Searching for America’s First Black Woman Novelist
It was one of the most dramatic discovery stories in recent literary history. In 2001, the scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. announced that he had discovered the earliest known novel by an African American woman, a never-published tale purportedly written in the 1850s by an enslaved woman named Hannah Crafts.
The 301-page manuscript, a harrowing tale of violence and sexual abuse that also brazenly mocked the self-regard of enslavers, was published in 2002 as “The Bondwoman’s Narrative.” It hit the New York Times best-seller list, even as some experts questioned whether the novel, with its sensational plot twists and references to Victorian novels, was really the work of an enslaved woman.
Doubts receded in 2013, when Gregg Hecimovich, a little-known literary scholar, announced that he had tracked down the real-life author. “Hannah Crafts,” he argued, was the pen name of Hannah Bond, an enslaved house servant who, disguised as a man, had escaped from a plantation in North Carolina owned by John Hill Wheeler in 1857, shortly after her 30th birthday.
(3/6/25)
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