Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda
1814–1873
Biography
Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda (1814–1873) was a writer born in Puerto Príncipe (today Camagüey), in Cuba. She left the island as a young woman, settled in Spain in 1836, and built most of her career there, though she lived in Cuba again for some years after 1859. She wrote poems, plays and novels, and for a time published under the pen name La Peregrina, meaning the Pilgrim. Madrid was where her life ended, in 1873.
Her best-known work is Sab, a novel published in Madrid in 1841. Its title character is an enslaved man who loves Carlota, the daughter of the family he serves, and who keeps his feelings hidden from her. By condemning slavery through this private tragedy, the book is counted among the important early antislavery novels, an achievement for a writer from a colony built on slave labour.
Her plays and poems are less often read now than Sab, which is why the novel remains the way most readers first meet her. The site holds the book in its original Spanish, under the title Sab (novela original), so readers can encounter it in the language she wrote it in.
This biography was written by a language model. The sources below are where to check it; treat details with care.
Books
Sab (novela original)
by Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda
On a Cuban sugar plantation, Sab, an enslaved man of great gifts who runs his master's estate, silently loves Carlota, the master's daughter, who is engaged to the son of a calculating English merchant. Published in 1841, it is among the first antislavery novels.
Summary written by Claude Opus 5.5.