The jacket cover says it best—”a detective story, a literary chase, and a cultural history.” A fascinating and detailed account of the research required to finally identify Hannah Crafts as the author of The Bondwoman’s Narrative, the first novel written by a Black female novelist. Particularly interesting if you are familiar with the geography of the Carolinas, but a history lesson regardless on the shifting economics behind American slavery in the 18th and 19th centuries and the vile practices and rationalizations slave-owning families engaged in. Hecimovich, a fellow at Harvard and an English professor at Furman, demonstrates how Crafts interwove personal experience and her deep understanding of Dickens’ Bleak House as well as male and female slave narratives. The sophistication of the intertextuality of her tale led historians to doubt for decades that the author could have been an enslaved individual until Hecimovich. Learned a lot.
https://www.harpercollins.com/blogs/authors/gregg-hecimovich-880000010975