In Search Of Hannah Crafts by Henry Louis Gates Jr.

If you wanted to get this in the hands of a “Bleak House” scholar-which is at least one kind of expertise that turns out to be relevant- The New Yorker turns out to be a highly efficient vehicle. All sorts of wonderfully erudite scholars have read the manuscript in typescript, and I’ve been the beneficiary of that, but The New Yorker really has a remarkable readership, and I’ve been the beneficiary of that, too. Now, you asked about publishing this in The New Yorker. You wonder whether that’s part of what attracted her to it. And, of course, “Bleak House” is famous for having a female narrator. Dickens writes that “the very shadows of the cherry-trees and apple-trees were heavy with fruit,” and Hannah Crafts writes that “the very shadows of the orange trees seemed dropping with fruit.” One can imagine her writing that passage with an open copy of Dickens on her desk, or at least an open copy of her commonplace book. For example, readers of The New Yorker-most notably, Hollis Robbins, an alert graduate student-have pointed out some striking similarities to passages in “Bleak House.” In one instance, you can see the author of “The Bondwoman’s Narrative” copying a rhetorical structure but changing the words: Dickens writes, “Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows,” and she writes, “Gloom up the Potomac where it rolls among meadows no longer green.” And sometimes the borrowings are verbatim, or nearly so. And the response so far has been gratifying. I really wanted to invite the widest possible community of readers-amateur historians as well as professionals-to see what they might come up with that might shed more light on Hannah Crafts and this really quirky book she produced. In Search of Hannah Crafts is the book that scholars and students of African-American Studies, of women writers, and of slavery will need to understand this unprecedented historical and literary event.HENRY LOUIS GATES, JR.: Well, there’s an element of a detective story here, but not one with a Sherlock Holmes-style solution, because so much remains mysterious. The Bondwoman’s Narrative will take its place in the African-American canon. In Search of Hannah Crafts now brings together twenty-two authorities on African-American history, including Nina Baym, Jean Fagan Yellin, William Andrews, Lawrence Buell, Karen Sanchez-Eppler, and Shelley Fisher-Fishkin to examine such issues as authenticity and the history and criticism of this unique novel. The Bondwoman’s Narrative was published in 2002.

discovered an unpublished manuscript, The Bondwoman’s Narrative, By Hannah Crafts, A Fugitive Recently Escaped From North Carolina, which turned out to be the first novel by a female African-American slave ever found, and possibly the first novel written by a black women anywhere.

In Search Of Hannah Crafts by Henry Louis Gates Jr.