The Pilgrim of Time: Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda and her echo in the 21st century

“There were no more than six writers there,” a newspaper reported about the cold burial in Madrid of the woman who, in her lifetime, had been the most important woman in the city after Isabella II. On that gray February afternoon in 1873, few imagined that the voice of the buried poet would resonate with increasing force in the centuries to come.

Born in 1814 in Puerto Príncipe, now Camagüey, Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda decided her destiny at just fifteen years old by rejecting an arranged marriage with the richest man in the province, an action that excluded her from the family inheritance but sealed her early rebellion against patriarchal structures.

At the age of twenty-two, she emigrated to Spain, where she spent almost her entire career under the pseudonym La Peregrina. Her love life was intense and public by the standards of her time, marked by passionate relationships such as the one she had with the poet Gabriel García Tassara, with whom she had a daughter who died at nine months old.

Avellaneda faced the most explicit institutional rejection in 1853 when, after the death of her friend Juan Nicasio Gallego, she applied for admission to the Royal Spanish Academy. The institution denied her entry, arguing that no individual of her sex could occupy a seat, although years later she would bequeath the rights to her works to that same institution.

In 1841, she published Sab, considered the first anti-slavery novel in Spanish and a work that went beyond a simple abolitionist plea by exploring an interracial love between a Black slave and a white woman, something unprecedented for its time. The immediate censorship the novel faced confirms its subversive nature.

He also published Dos mujeres (1842), where he openly defended divorce as a solution to unhappy unions, and Guatimozín (1846), a historical novel about the conquest of Mexico that offered a critical perspective on Hernán Cortés and, by extension, on Spanish colonialism.

Her theatrical output included works such as Baltasar (1858), considered one of the pinnacles of Spanish Romantic theater. As a poet, she combined the Neoclassical style with a Romantic sensibility tinged with personal pessimism, creating a body of lyrical work that later critics placed among the most important in Spanish literature.

Avellaneda embodies the dual identity of many 19th-century Latin American intellectuals. Born in Cuba when it was a Spanish province, she developed her literary career primarily on the Iberian Peninsula, but always maintained an emotional connection to her homeland. During her time in Havana between 1859 and 1863, she was acclaimed as the national poet.

Gender studies have rediscovered her as a pioneer of Latin American feminism. Remarkably, she managed to transgress the limits imposed on women writers of her time without adopting male pseudonyms or disguises, as her contemporary George Sand did. Her love correspondence, especially the letters to Ignacio de Cepeda, reveal today a keen awareness of the restrictions her gender imposed on her life and work.

Contemporary critics value in Avellaneda what was previously criticized: her discursive plurality and her resistance to easy categorization. It is no longer seen as a flaw that her work blends vitalistic effusion with the rationality of civic odes, nor that it engages with the Spanish literary tradition while maintaining a distinctly Cuban voice.

Recent research highlights how her work anticipates 21st-century concerns: the intersectionality of race and gender in Sab, the critique of colonialism in Guatimozín, and the defense of female autonomy throughout her oeuvre.

In her 1864 will, she bequeathed the rights to her works to the Royal Spanish Academy, not as a tribute, but with a plea for forgiveness for “the lapses and injustices” she may have committed when the Academy rejected her because of her sex. This gesture, both ironic and dignified, encapsulates the paradox of her posthumous recognition.

Today, as we approach the bicentenary of her birth, her figure transcends debates about nationality or gender. As art critic and literary researcher Roberto Méndez Martínez points out: “Two poets inaugurated our literature: José María Heredia and Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda. Both share the greatest honor: attempting the impossible.”

In the 21st century, when national literatures are being reconfigured into diasporas and identities are recognized as multiple, Gertrudis’s work finds its most opportune moment. Her voice, which in life constantly negotiated a place between two shores and against the limitations of her gender, speaks today with surprising relevance to readers who understand the richness of border identities and the need to continue challenging, with words, all forms of enslavement.