In 1879, Ortea wrote
Las feministas, a zarzuela (The Feminists, A Zarzuela), the only known zarzuela by a Dominican writer. The lyric drama, with music by Rodríguez Arresón, was performed only once, at the House of Culture of Puerto Plata. Ortea first began publishing under the pseudonym Elena Kennedy, the name of her paternal grandmother, while she was living in Mayaguëz. She published the poem,
Puerto Plata in 1889. After returning to the Dominican Republic, she wrote for the daily newspaper
Listín Diario Puerto Plata. She also published editorials and poems for various journals, such as
La casa de América,
Letras y ciencias, and
Revista ilustrada. In 1901, she became the first woman in the Dominican Republic to have her own
byline. Though she first wrote as a journalist, Ortea is most known as a fiction writer. Often described as creatively simple or naïve by critics of her era, underlying humor and subject matter in her works demonstrate that she understood the gender role assigned to women in her time. In her own way, she wrote social critiques, but balanced topics against each other, as in
Recuerdos y sonrisas (Memores and Smiles) and
La mala madrastra (The Evil Stepmother), representing good and bad. Her first published works included
Los Diamantes (The Diamonds),
La Rosa de la Felicidad (The Rose of Happiness),
Los Bautizos (The Baptisms) and
Mi hermana Carolina (My Sister Carolina), but her most mature work was
Risas y lágrimas (Laughter and Tears) published in 1901. The introduction was written by noted Dominican critics like , which led to her becoming the subject of many studies by Dominican literary critics and scholars. ==Death and legacy==