Sab and Autobiography

<p>Eleven years before <i>Uncle Tom's Cabin</i> fanned the fires of abolition in North America an aristocratic Cuban woman told an impassioned story of the fatal love of a mulatto slave for his white owner's daughter. So controversial was <i>Sab</i>'s theme of miscegenation and its parallel between the powerlessness and enslavement of blacks and the economic and matrimonial subservience of women that the book was not published in Cuba until 1914 seventy-three years after its original 1841 publication in Spain.</p> <p>Also included in the volume is Avellaneda's <i>Autobiography</i> (1839) whose portrait of an intelligent flamboyant woman struggling against the restrictions of her era amplifies the novel's exploration of the patriarchal oppression of minorities and women.</p>