The Life and Times of Hannah Crafts
The True Story of The Bondwoman's Narrative
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3.7 • 3 Ratings
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
A Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize
A finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography
A groundbreaking study of the first Black female novelist and her life as an enslaved woman, from the biographer who solved the mystery of her identity, with a forward by Henry Louis Gates Jr.
In 1857, a woman escaped enslavement on a North Carolina plantation and fled to a farm in New York. In hiding, she worked on a manuscript that would make her famous long after her death. The novel, The Bondwoman’s Narrative, was first published in 2002 to great acclaim, but the author’s identity remained unknown. Over a decade later, Professor Gregg Hecimovich unraveled the mystery of the author’s name and, in The Life and Times of Hannah Crafts, he finally tells her story.
In this remarkable biography, Hecimovich identifies the novelist as Hannah Bond “Crafts.” She was not only the first known Black woman to compose a novel but also an extraordinarily gifted artist who honed her literary skills in direct opposition to a system designed to deny her every measure of humanity. After escaping to New York, the author forged a new identity—as Hannah Crafts—to make sense of a life fractured by slavery.
Hecimovich establishes the case for authorship of The Bondwoman’s Narrative by examining the lives of Hannah Crafts’s friends and contemporaries, including the five enslaved women whose experiences form part of her narrative. By drawing on the lives of those she knew in slavery, Crafts summoned into her fiction people otherwise stolen from history.
At once a detective story, a literary chase, and a cultural history, The Life and Times of Hannah Crafts discovers a tale of love, friendship, betrayal, and violence set against the backdrop of America’s slide into Civil War.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Furman University English professor Hecimovich (Puzzling the Reader) delivers a captivating biography of Hannah Crafts, America's first known Black female novelist. A manuscript titled The Bondswoman's Narrative, written in the 1850s, was authenticated and published for the first time by Henry Louis Gates Jr. in 2002, though the life story of the author, Hannah Crafts, remained largely unknown. After 20 years of research, Hecimovich has pieced together an account of the writer's life, identifying her as Hannah Bond. Born into slavery in 1826 Berti County, N.C., Bond was brought up working as a domestic servant in the home of her enslavers, Lewis Bond and Catherine Pugh Bond. She escaped to New York in 1857, with part of The Bondswoman's Narrative hidden among her belongings; she completed it while in hiding, when she also adopted the last name Crafts, after the Quaker family who harbored her. She eventually settled in New York under the married name Hannah Vincent and, according to census records, lived at least into the 1910s. Drawing on extensive archival research and deep literary analysis (Bond was highly influenced by Charles Dickens's Bleak House), Hecimovich sheds light on key aspects of Bond's life, including her friendships with other women who escaped from slavery and whose experiences she worked into her novel. Part literary detective story, part suspenseful escape narrative, this impressive account ties together its many disparate threads into a riveting whole. It's a must-read.
