Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda y Arteaga (March 23, 1814 – February 1, 1873) was a 19th-century Cuban-born Spanish writer.

The eponymous protagonist is a slave who is deeply in love with his mistress Carlota, who is entirely oblivious to his feelings for her.

[3] Her mother, Francisca María del Rosario de Arteaga y Betancourt, was a criolla[a] with ascendants from the Basque Country and the Canary Islands, member of the wealthy Arteaga y Betancourt family, which was one of the most prominent and important families in Puerto Príncipe.

[5] Avellaneda was the first of five children from her parents' marriage, but only she and her younger brother Manuel survived childhood.

)[1] It is thought that this traumatic experience fueled her hatred of arranged marriages and patriarchal authority and her belief that married women were essentially slaves.

[14] The family set sail for Europe on April 9, 1836, and arrived in Bordeaux, France two months later.

When Francisco was sent to fight in the Carlist Wars, she left Galicia to go to Seville with her younger brother Manuel; she would never see him again.

[15][1] She was glad to leave Galicia, as she was criticized by Galician women for her refusal to do manual labor and for her love of study.

[18] In 1839, shortly after her arrival in Seville, she met and fell deeply in love with Ignacio de Cepeda y Alcalde, a wealthy, well-educated, and socially prominent young man.

Biographers of Avellaneda have relied too heavily on this account for information about her early life, as it was written for a specific purpose: to make a good impression on Cepeda.

In Madrid she had a number of tumultuous love affairs, some with prominent writers associated with Spanish Romanticism.

Avellaneda soon married a younger man, don Pedro Sabater, who worked for the Cortes and was very wealthy.

As a result, she entered a convent right after his death and wrote a play called Egilona which did not receive good reviews like her last one had.

In January 1853, she tried to enroll into the Royal Academy in after a seat belonging to a dead friend of hers, Juan Nicasio Gallego, became vacant.

While all the males in the academy were aware of her works and were fascinated by them, they did not give her the right to enter, solely based on the fact that she was a woman.

This left her in severe distress, and she decided return to Madrid after a few visits to New York, London, Paris and Seville.

[1] She published the first volume of her collected literary works (Spanish: Obras literarias), omitting the novels Sab and Dos mujeres.

¡Doquier que el hado en su furor me impela, tu dulce nombre halagará mi oído!

Night’s murky veil Is drawn across the sky’s refulgent trail, And I succumb to sorrow’s ravishment.

…As to their labors bent, The crewmen now their tasks assail, To wrest me from my home, they hoist the sail To catch the ardent winds that you have sent.

The ship breaks clear, And with soft quiet motion, wave and water fends.

Her works are influenced by some of the major French, English, Spanish, and Latin American poets.

Avellaneda's works were considered scandalous because of her recurrent themes of interracial love and society's divisions.

In fact, Sab could be considered an early example of negrismo, a literary tendency when white creole authors depicted black people, usually with a favorable stance.

Two other Creole women who cultivated negrista fiction were the Argentine Juana Manuela Gorriti (Peregrinaciones de una alma triste & El ángel caído) and the Peruvian Teresa González de Fanning whose Roque Moreno paints a less than sympathetic stance toward blacks and mulattoes.

However, because Cepeda did not want a committed relationship with her and married another woman, it made la Avellaneda suffer.

Source: John Charles Chasteen, "Born in Blood and Fire, A Concise History of Latin America" There has been much debate over whether Gertrud's Gómez de Avellaneda is a Cuban or Spanish writer.

[23] She is widely viewed as the "epitome of the Romantic poet, the tragic heroine who rises to public acclaim yet, in private, is bitterly unhappy."

[24] Also, much of her work is read from a biographical perspective because of the posthumous publication of her love letters to Ignacio Cepeda, to the extent that her life has overshadowed the wider cultural significance of her literary output.