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
  Basic Books, 458 pp, £17.50, January 2005, ISBN 0 465 02708 3

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 Henry Louis Gates, chairman of the African-American Studies Department at Harvard, had bought at auction the unpublished manuscript of the ‘earliest known novel by a female African-American slave and probably the earliest known novel by a black woman anywhere’.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’.