The Peruvian poet Magda Portal has been the subject of much fine and recent scholarship, specifically for her involvement in the Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana (American Popular Revolutionary Alliance, APRA), a highly influential populist and anti-imperialist movement in twentieth-century Peru and Latin America more broadly. Daniel R. Reedy (Magda Portal, La Pasionaria peruana: Biografía intelectual, Ediciones Flora Tristán, 2000; Magda Portal: Obra poética completa, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2010), Myriam Gonzales Smith (Poética e ideología en Magda Portal: Otras dimensiones de la vanguardia en Latinoamérica, Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 2007), Kathleen Weaver (Peruvian Rebel: The World of Magda Portal, with a Selection of her Poems, Penn State Press, 2009) and Iñigo García-Bryce (‘Transnational Activist: Magda Portal and the American Popular Revolutionary Alliance (APRA), 1926–1950’, The Americas, 70: 4 (2014), pp. 667–706) have all turned their gaze to Portal's extraordinarily life and contributions. Was yet another biography of Magda Portal truly necessary? I, for one, wondered. Yet it didn't take long after delving into Most Scandalous Woman for me to conclude that the answer was a loud and resounding ‘yes’ – as long as Myrna Ivonne Wallace Fuentes was the author of that book.

Most Scandalous Woman is an outstanding study authored by a keen and sensitive historian and a stunningly gifted writer. It details the personal struggles that underpinned Magda Portal's political activism from her coming of age as a young and radical poet in the early 1920s (Part 1) through her rise to leadership in the Peruvian APRA party in the 1930s (Part 2) to her abrupt break from Aprismo, 30 years after participating in its foundation (Part 3). Through this detailed study of Portal's life, Wallace Fuentes takes us far beyond the focus of biographical works, deep into the history of leftist and gendered politics in twentieth-century Peru. Most Scandalous Woman paints an overall intimate portrait of what drives revolutionaries, and more particularly what enables, limits and ultimately determines the types of decisions they can make for themselves and for their causes. It sheds a compassionate, yet scrupulous, light on how political demands for social change come about, or falter.

The core merit of Wallace Fuentes’ book resides in her methodology, specifically in how she approaches her primary source material. The author is less interested in the choices of her historical actors than in the personal, and at times quite painful, struggles that these actors experienced as they went through their decision-making process. Wallace Fuentes, in short, yields historical meaning not from endpoints or results, but rather by looking into the deeply personal processes and conflicts that lead to them. Drawing from an eclectic repertoire of primary sources – from poetry, novels and personal correspondence to political doctrine, party propaganda and US diplomatic reports – on one side, and approaching emotions as a category of historical analysis on the other, Most Scandalous Woman successfully dissects moments of ambivalence in Portal's life so as to uncover what socially and politically lay beneath them. Thus, through an analytical lens that focuses on one individual, Wallace Fuentes in fact informs us about the social fabric that contributed to shaping Peruvian radicals.

This shrewd exploration of Portal's intimate political engagement leads to three key contributions of Wallace Fuentes’ work. The first is the vindication of the political legacy of Magda Portal as a major figure of the Left in twentieth-century Latin America. Wallace Fuentes revises common portrayals of Portal, arguing she was neither weak nor vulnerable, as many of her peers and enemies have suggested. The character whom Wallace Fuentes details is a strong, savvy and influential political leader who debated on par with, and even mentored, prominent politicians of the past century like the Venezuelan Rómulo Betancourt and the Peruvian Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre. Portal appears as an uncompromising radical, ‘a vanguard New Woman’, who advocated political and social change as well as the active participation of women in fostering it. This is an important and well construed, if unoriginal, argument of the book. Others before Wallace Fuentes offered such a revision, although none with the same detailed precision.

The second and most significant contribution of this book historicises the everyday and intimate feelings inherent in political activism. It correspondingly assesses the role that emotions play in shaping revolutionary thought. Specifically, Wallace Fuentes shows that Portal's political coming of age was closely intertwined with notions of gendered and individual emancipation. For example, she perceptively traces how Portal gained a new social consciousness of oppression to a large extent thanks to her ambivalent experience with motherhood in her early twenties. Growing into an iconoclast woman who defied the sense of decency that Catholic and conservative Lima imposed on women is ultimately what enabled Portal to move her political energy outward, ‘from changing her life to changing the world, from transforming herself to transforming the world's powers and structures’ (p. 93). Wallace Fuentes perceptively argues that personal liberation was necessary before Portal was able to become the revolutionary activist known for her involvement in the anti-imperialist APRA. Wallace Fuentes also questions the ‘gendered limits’ of revolutionary affiliations, notably by exploring the ways in which being a woman both empowered Portal as an APRA ideologue and limited what it was ultimately possible for her to do politically. Her demonstration is here bold and superbly insightful. Rarely, if ever, have I seen a historian use emotions so shrewdly as a category of historical analysis. Wallace Fuentes’ narrative is impregnated with sensitivity in a way that not only makes the reading agreeable but also accounts for historical change.

The third contribution feeds into the collective dynamics of the APRA movement. Wallace Fuentes offers a vivid history of the growth and evolution of the APRA movement from the 1920s through to the 1950s and beyond in a way that underscores two understudied themes in the study of Aprismo: (i) the prevalence and the impacts of internal conflicts in the party, and (ii) the weight that state persecution exerted on the political activism of major APRA leaders. The title of the book is here problematic for being shortsighted. Wallace Fuentes accomplishes much more than simply reviewing the life and career of APRA leader Magda Portal. Yet it is unclear whether Wallace Fuentes herself appreciates the full extent of the merits of her work on APRA. Indeed, her hesitation becomes a blind spot. She refrains from seriously engaging with the growing scholarship on the APRA movement – the absence of important titles in her bibliography conspicuously reveals this blind spot – thereby missing out on methodological caveats that might have proved useful to her arguments in Parts 2 and 3. Wallace Fuentes too often takes at face value the published correspondence and testimonies of other major APRA leaders, such as those of Luis Alberto Sánchez, which are traversed by political goals and ambitions and thus would have required a more critical reading. This is a surprising mishap considering the extreme caution with which Wallace Fuentes reads Magda Portal's sources. Ultimately, this lack of analytical rigour does not lead to any gross historical misinterpretation. It nevertheless thwarts the full revisionist potential of Wallace Fuentes’ analysis for the history of the APRA movement as a whole.

Most Scandalous Woman details how intimate, often life-shattering, but also fundamentally liberating political engagement can be. It will be of interest to a large audience. Those interested in radical politics, the history of emotions, gender history and the history of anti-imperialist and anti-oligarchic movements in Latin America will find in this book food for thought. Most Scandalous Woman is above all a tour de force of historical writing. I cannot insist enough on the outstanding quality of Wallace Fuentes as a storyteller. She takes her readers so closely by the hand from beginning to end that her demonstration reads effortlessly. She weaves her historical arguments into a seamless and engaging narrative that takes on an air of fictional writing. Historians should read her book to learn the craft William Cronon called for in his 2013 presidential address, entitled ‘Storytelling’, to the American Historical Association. University professors should assign this book in their classes to have their students fall in love with history. Students in all disciplines involving narrative-based arguments should study this book carefully. They'll understand the power of rigorous and sensitive historical work. They'll realise that critical analyses, like novels, can move you to the bone.