In this thesis we have tried to identify and compare the dominant determinants of the journalistic and literary engagement of two writers and journalists in their respective national settings: Matilde Serao in Italy and Marija Jurić Zagorka in Croatia. These two writers and 'first journalists' were most active in a chronologically almost similar period, although there is a twenty-year age difference beween them, i.e. there is a thirty-year difference with regard to the time of their death, and thus to the most fertile period of their creativity. Matilde Serao was born in Patras in 1856, and died in Naples in 1927. Marija Jurić Zagorka was born in 1873 in Vrbovec, and died in 1957 in Zagreb. The research is based on a comparative analysis of biographical and professional facts that significantly influenced their literary and journalistic work, which was in both cases extremely fruitful and extensive, as well as on the writers' own works. The first chapter gives an overview of the literary-historical situation at the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century in Italy and Croatia. The second chapter presents biographical facts from the lives of the two artists, and explains how these shaped their perception of reality. Through their correspondence with contemporaries we get to know the two writers and journalists as persons who were active in the private and public sphere. The third chapter analyzes their journalistic engagement and their ideology as feminists or anti-feminists, as well as political or apolitical beings in the context of society and the age in which they lived. The fourth chapter deals with their literatures, the problems of trivial or canonical literature, and the problem of 'women's writing'. At the center of their literary production are female characters who we analyze as spokespersons for their female ideology.