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“... 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 ...”

“... notice that Jane’s sewing box is bigger than her writing box. It may have been the same with Hannah Crafts. Where had this manuscript been? Its early adventures are uncertain. Before 1948 it seems to have been in an attic in New Jersey. Then it was bought by the black historian and bibliographer Dorothy Porter Wesley; after her death, it came to ...”

“... London. Flanders is good on the domestic implications of this and much else. It was their mother, Hannah, who bore the brunt of the struggle on a tiny income, the laborious process of moving, the new starts in strange houses, most of them undertaken in the course of one of her 11 pregnancies. The intellectually vigorous, self-improving culture of the ...”

“... We expect more of it and less of ourselves, adjusting our pace and investing in the big picture. Hannah Sullivan’s majestic debut offers three big pictures – birth, coming of age and death – but this isn’t a triptych. Instead, these themes extend across the book, with the poems acting as a set of transparencies that enlarge and complicate one ...”

“... least some of her 14 children – ‘most of whom died suddenly’. May, in her turn, had taught Hannah Ham (the names chime gay as nursery rhymes and Dr Seuss) how to kill her husband with arsenic. Local women talked of ‘white powdering’ their husbands and children, ‘seasoning a pie’ or ‘giving them a dose’. People said that there were women’s ...”

“... Myles – Nelson finds her artistic focus drawn in two main directions. On the one hand, she crafts her words until she gets them to ‘facet’ as accurately as she can: ‘How to explain that for some, or for some at some times, this irresolution is OK – desirable even … whereas for others, or for others at some times, it stays a source of conflict ...”