The life and times of Hannah Crafts : the true story of The Bondwoman's Narrative

First Title Value for Searching:

Personal Author:

Hecimovich, Gregg A.

Edition:

First edition.

Physical Description:

xvii, 412 pages : illustrations (black and white) ; 24 cm.

Summary:

"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." --

Contents:

Foreword / Henry Louis Gates, Jr. -- Beginnings -- The search -- Nat Turner, the Wheelers, and The Bondwoman's Narrative -- The revolt -- The candidates -- Childhood -- Property -- Rosea Pugh and Hannah Sr. -- The early life of Hannah Crafts -- The Bondwoman's Narrative and Uncle Tom's Cabin -- The notebook -- Religion -- The Wheelers -- The novel -- The life and times of Eliza Morgan -- The Bondwoman's Narrative and Bleak House -- The search continued -- The life and times of Jane Johnson -- The life and times of Hannah Crafts -- The life and times of Hannah Vincent.

Subject Term:

African American women novelists -- Biography.

Enslaved women -- United States -- Biography.

Fugitive slaves -- United States -- Biography.

Additional Credits:

Gates, Henry Louis, Jr.

Publication Info:

New York, NY : Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, 2023.

Subject:

African American women novelists -- Biography.

Enslaved women -- United States -- Biography.

Fugitive slaves -- United States -- Biography.

Crafts, Hannah

קראפטס, האנה

Bond, Hannah

Afro-American women novelists

Women novelists, African American

Women, Enslaved

Women slaves

SAILS ISBN:

9780062334732

Available:

Library	Shelf Number	Shelf Location	Status
Searching... Bridgewater Public Library	813.4 HECIMOVICH 2023	NONFICTION	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Fairhaven-Millicent	B CRAFTS (HAN) HEC 2023	NEW NONFICTION	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Foxboro - Boyden Library	B CRAFTS	NEW NONFICTION	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Middleborough Public Library	B CRAFTS	NEW BIOGRAPHY	Searching... Unknown
Searching... New Bedford Free Public Library	B CRAFTS HEC 2023	NEW BIOGRAPHY	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Norton Public Library	B CRAFTS, H. HEC 2023	NEW BIOGRAPHY	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Rehoboth - Blanding Free PL	B CRAFTS	NEW NONFICTION	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Richards Memorial Library	813.3 H355	NEW NONFICTION	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Taunton Public Library	973.6092 H355L	3RD FLOOR STACKS	Searching... Unknown

Bound With These Titles

On Order

Summary

A finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize

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.

Reviews (2)

Publisher's Weekly Review

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. (Oct.)

Kirkus Review

A resurrection of the life of the first African American female novelist. "The Bondwoman's Narrative by Hannah Crafts, A Fugitive Slave Recently Escaped from North Carolina." So reads the title page of a 19th-century manuscript that was not published until 2002. The novel tells the story of a captive, also named Hannah, who escaped from slavery, and scholars have worked for two decades to disentangle its facts from fiction. If Hannah Crafts really was the fugitive slave she claimed to be, The Bondwoman's Narrative would be the earliest known novel written by an African American woman. In 2013, Hecimovich, an English professor, made a case that Crafts was exactly that, identifying her as a captive who escaped from the prominent Wheeler family of North Carolina in 1857. Here, the author presents his full version of Hannah's story, tightly woven out of her novel's clues about her life and his own copious archival research. Hecimovich traces the woman who called herself Hannah Crafts, following her from North Carolina to New Jersey, where she settled in freedom. Along the way, he explores how Crafts may have built her autobiographical novel, drawing on her experiences of slavery's violence and loss and shaping composite characters based on other captives and their captors. However, as Hecimovich shows, carrying her fellow captives to freedom was not the only way that Crafts practiced rebellion through her art. In her novel, she also rewrote and "blackened" stories from white novelists like Harriet Beecher Stowe and Charles Dickens, a practice of sampling and appropriation that Hecimovich fascinatingly details. "Writing The Bondwoman's Narrative," notes Hecimovich, "represented a quest for the author to wrest back a life otherwise stolen from her…to control her world, escape it, and then rewrite it with a happy ending." Henry Louis Gates Jr., who first authenticated the manuscript, provides the preface. An absorbing work of historical and literary excavation. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.