The Author: Brígida M. Pastor is Senior Lecturer of Hispanic studies at the University of Glasgow. She received her doctorate from the University of Bristol. She is the author of many articles and essays on the Cuban writer as well as El discurso de Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda: Identidad Femenina y Otredad (2002). She has also published widely on other topics within Spanish and Latin American literature and on Cuban and Spanish film. In 1999, her studies on Avellaneda earned her a special award from the Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda Chair in Gender Studies at the Instituto de Literatura y Lingüística, Havana, Cuba.

«Brígida Pastor is certainly one of Cuban studies’ foremost authorities on both nineteenth-century Cuban literature and, specifically, on Gómez de Avellaneda. This study will encourage both an awareness and a reassessment of this significant but perhaps underestimated writer in the light of new knowledge and new ideas on female-authored fiction and with Pastor’s incisive vision.» (Dr. Anthony Kapcia, Director of the Forum for the Study of Cuba, University of Wolverhampton)«Brígida Pastor’s book is an insightful, original and comprehensive study of the nineteenth-century Cuban author, Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda. Pastor presents a convincing analysis of Avellaneda’s prose works, using current psychoanalytical, gender based theory to reveal the writer’s importance in advancing feminist thought in Cuba and the Hispanic world generally. It also includes discussion of some of Avellaneda’s work which have been hitherto largely ignored. This is an ideal text for scholars and students of Spanish and Latin American Studies, as well as those with a special interest in Cuban literature and gender studies.» (Professor Olga Cabrera, Universidade Federal de Goiás and Centro de Estudos de Caribe no Brasil, Editor of the Journal ‘Revista Brasileira do Caribe’)«This excellent new work contributes to contemporary theories of gender. It reveals that even in the Hispanic tradition, seminal writers such as Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda sought to deconstruct the representation of gender well before the advent of post-modernism’s explosion of interest in the topic. Dr. Pastor’s sensitive and beautifully researched book reclaims for Avellaneda her rightful place at the vanguard of Hispanic feminism.» (Professor Nara Araújo, University of Havana/Colegio de México)