The mystery of the first American novel written by a Black woman
we still may not know
The headlines were easy. Throughout the country —from Jackson, Mississippi and Indianapolis, Indiana, to New York City and Boston—copyeditors chose the same four words. It was 1891 and the headline was “The First Negro Novelist.” The book was called True Love and it was written by a 26 year old Sarah E. Farro living in Chicago. It was one of fifty-eight (58!) books written by Illinois women to be exhibited at the 1893 World Fair. The story is told in the English domestic fashion: a young man wants to marry a woman, but is thwarted by her terrible sister and mother. It is a story about white people full of melodrama. (you can read it online here!)
Of course, being the “first negro novelist” meant that plenty of papers allowed the book to be reviewed, criticized, and evaluated by racists. I will not reprint the things they wrote about this book and (through massive extrapolation) about Black Americans, but here is a link to a Memphis paper’s review.
Despite these reviews, the book had sold out its first edition by April 1892. According to the Detroit Free Press, she was working on a second novel by then. It never came out. In fact, American culture forgot about Sarah E. Farro almost completely after her death until 2012 when Dr. Gretchen Gerzina discovered an announcement for her book in The Daily Telegraph.
By then, we knew that those headlines had been wrong: Farro wasn’t the first.
Now we know that it is basically impossible to definitively say who the first Black American woman writer was.
The first novel we know of written by a Black American woman is currently believed to be The Bondwoman’s Narrative by Hannah Crafts. The novel was written between 1853 and 1861 and is believed to be the one of the first novels by a fugitive slave. The story follows Hannah, a light skinned enslaved person who grows up on a plantation, is taught to read and write by a white woman, realizes that her enslaver’s mistress is passing for white, and flees with her to freedom.
The book was discovered by Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr of Harvard University. Gates bought the manuscript from the estate of African-American scholar Dorothy Porter in 2001 for $8000. Through the identification of ink type and lack of mention of the war or secession, Gates and other scholars agreed that Crafts wrote her book before 1861.
This was not Gates’ first rodeo. In 1982, he was browsing through a New York City bookstore and picked up a book for $50 dollars. The book was called Our Nig and was published in 1859. It was — until the discovery of The Bondswoman’s Narrative —considered the first novel by a Black American. “While many black Americans had published novels in London, historians had previously believed that it was not until after the Civil War that a black man had published a novel in the United States and that no black woman had published a novel in this country until 1892,” the New York Times wrote.
That 1892 novel was Iola Leroy by Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, who we talked about last week.
All of this is to say that we have mistakenly called a novel by a Black American woman the first three times incorrectly already, and it is highly likely that we will do so again. Currently, we only know of six Black american novelists in the 19th century: William Wells Brown, Frances Harper, Harriet E. Wilson, Hannah Crafts and Frank J. Webb.
Iola Leroy was reprinted continuously until 1895, then forgotten, and not republished until 1971. Our Nig was rediscovered in 1982. The Bondswoman’s Narrative was rediscovered in 2001. True Love was rediscovered in 2012.
It took one search (“first negro novelist”) on Newspapers.com for me to find Sarah E. Farro.
At any moment, we could find another. We just have to keep looking.
REMINDER: If you are a Black writer who reads this newsletter and would like to write anything about women’s literature (does not have to be about Black writers; does not have to be about *this moment*), email me. I pay better rates than most magazines at this point and would love to promote your work
ALSO: if you are a reader who wants to support these funded stories by Black writers financially, just let me know! I have a fund!