This tale of a slave's unrequited love for the woman who owns him is set in nineteenth-century colonial Cuba and was the only feminist-abolitionist novel published during the century in Spain or its colonies. This unique text raises important issues concerning power, race, gender and class in colonial societies, colonial and post-colonial subjectivity and identities, feminist appropriations of the abolitionist agenda, human rights discourse, and literary and philosophical issues associated with enlightenment thought. This new annotated critical edition is the first to provide the original Spanish text along with a substantial and authoritative introduction in English, as well as maps and tables relating to nineteenth-century Cuba, a vocabulary list, and suggestions for further reading.