Every single one matters 
Elaine Showalter and English Showalter
- In Search of Hannah Crafts: Critical Essays on ‘The Bondwoman’s Narrative’ edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr and Hollis Robbins Buy this book
On 11 November 2001, the New York Times announced a major literary discovery. Henry Louis Gates, chairman of the African-American Studies Department at Harvard, had bought at auction the unpublished manuscript of the ‘earliest known novel by a female African-American slave and probably the earliest known novel by a black woman anywhere’. According to the article, the novel, signed by Hannah Crafts and called ‘The Bondwoman’s Narrative’, was the story of a woman’s life as a house slave on the North Carolina plantation of John Hill Wheeler, her escape to New Jersey in 1857, and her composition of an autobiographical fiction incorporating ‘elements of the many sentimental sagas she had evidently borrowed from Mr Wheeler’s shelf’. Although ‘replete with the heavy-handed moralising and preposterous coincidence characteristic of the popular women’s fiction of the time’, ‘The Bondwoman’s Narrative’ was ‘unique as a surviving handwritten manuscript by an escaped slave, providing singularly direct access to its author’s thoughts and feelings’.
Subscribers to the print edition can log in to view the entire article. For information about subscribing to the London Review of Books click here. This article is available for purchase online. Buy this article.
Elaine Showalter is preparing a literary history of American women writers from 1650 to 2000. English Showalter is co-editor of the multi-volume correspondence of Françoise de Graffigny, and the author of her biography, published last year.
Other articles by this contributor:
Prada Queen · Elaine Showalter goes shopping
Das Nuffa Dat and BigGloria3 · Up and Down the Academic Ladder
Fade to Greige · Georgio Armani
print layout
tell a friend