ENGL 1103

The Bondswoman's Narrative: America's First Black Woman Novelist & Her Victorian Sources

Course Description

Course information provided by the 2026-2027 Catalog.

In 2001, Henry Louis Gates Jr. purchased an unseen manuscript at auction and discovered what may be the first novel written by an African American woman: The Bondswoman's Narrative, dating to the 1850s. The novel—possibly written by an enslaved woman named Hannah Crafts—draws directly from canonical Victorian fiction, particularly Dickens' Bleak House and Brontë's Jane Eyre. What was a Black woman in antebellum America reading, and how did she reimagine these texts? The manuscript itself is incomplete, with gaps and unfinished sections: what can other nineteenth-century unfinished novels, like Austen's Sanditon, teach us about Crafts' fragmentary narrative? This one-credit course investigates authorship, transatlantic literary influence, textual recovery, and the aesthetics of unfinishedness.

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