Publishers Weekly
★ 08/28/2023
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.)
From the Publisher
"Furman University English professor Hecimovich (Puzzling the Reader) delivers a captivating biography of Hannah Crafts. 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." — Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"An absorbing work of historical and literary excavation." — Kirkus Reviews
“The Life and Times of Hannah Crafts may be one of the most important case studies ever written in how to search for and find an unknown author from clues she left in her fiction and from fleeting traces of her in family archives and memories. For two decades after Henry Louis Gates, Jr. discovered The Bondwoman’s Narrative, Gregg Hecimovich pieced together historical fact and fictionalized versions to situate Hannah Crafts in a particular family of enslavers. Gregg's dramatic findings verifying Gates’s discovery are clarifying, thrilling, and provocative, demanding we return to The Bondwoman’s Narrative anew.” — Hollis Robbins, author of Forms of Contention: Influence and the African American Sonnet Tradition
“Decades of sleuthing in the archives yielded the astonishing finds that lie behind The Life and Times of Hannah Crafts, Gregg Hecimovich’s spellbinding new biography. At once a mystery, a thriller, and an elegy, this book is a riveting reconstruction of the life—and literary influences—of the author of The Bondwoman’s Narrative (1858), the first novel written by a Black woman in the United States.” — Jill Lepore, author of Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin
“Interspersed with photos, descriptions of pertinent historical events, drawings, and digitized archival documents, this excellent biography will appeal to many readers.” — Library Journal (starred review)
“Riveting . . . . The resulting story is an inspired amalgam of genres — part thriller, part mystery and part biography. What emerges is a tale of a woman who was determined to be the protagonist of her story, regardless of what her society had in store for her. . . . [B]ooks like Hecimovich’s are a vital resource for readers who wish to engage with themselves and the wider world.” — Tope Folarin, Washington Post
Library Journal
★ 09/22/2023
The Bondwoman's Narrative, written in the 1850s by Hannah Crafts, remained undiscovered and unpublished for decades before it became a best seller in 2002. Its author, a formerly enslaved woman who found freedom, remained a mystery until 2013 when Hecimovich (English, Furman Univ.; Hardy's Tess), with dogged determination, solved the puzzle of her identity. Here Hecimovich presents Crafts's life and his fascinating sleuthing journey to identify her as the author of possibly the first novel written by a Black woman in the United States. Dickens's Bleak House served as the model for Crafts's exceptional book, and Hecimovich quotes frequently from both novels to substantiate his theory of Crafts's identity. He describes the challenges in narrowing down the individuals who potentially could have authored Bondwoman's and the difficulty of finding records of African Americans (both free and enslaved) whose lives intersected with Crafts's. He includes these individuals' histories to both rule them out as potential authors and memorialize them. VERDICT Interspersed with photos, descriptions of pertinent historical events, drawings, and digitized archival documents, this excellent biography will appeal to many readers, especially those interested in genealogy, literature, and African American history.—Erica Swenson Danowitz
Kirkus Reviews
2023-08-17
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.
