The Bondwoman's Narrative

Blurb

The Bondwoman's Narrative is a best-selling novel by Hannah Crafts, a self-proclaimed slave escaped from North Carolina. She likely wrote the novel in the mid-19th century. The manuscript was authenticated and published in 2002. Scholars believe that the novel, possibly the first written by an African-American woman, was created between 1853 and 1861. It is the only known novel by a fugitive slave woman, and it may precede the novel Our Nig by Harriet Wilson, published in 1859.
The 2002 publication includes a preface by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., professor of African-American literature and history at Harvard University, describing his buying the manuscript, verifying it, and research to identify the author. Crafts was believed to be a pseudonym of an enslaved woman who had escaped from the plantation of John Hill Wheeler.
In September 2013, Gregg Hecimovich, a professor of English at Winthrop University, documented the novelist as Hannah Bond, an African-American slave who escaped about 1857 from the plantation of Wheeler in Murfreesboro, North Carolina. She reached the North and settled in New Jersey.