Books by "Harriet E. Wilson"
7 books found
Our Nig, Or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black, in a Two-story White House, North
by Harriet E. Wilson
2002 · Vintage
Preface, introduction and notes by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., afterword by Barbara A. White. The first novel ever written by a black American, this fusion of the sentimental novel and the slave narrative, first published in 1859, was neglected until it recently became the subject of renewed scholarly interest. Recently the subject of a front page New York Times article, Our Nig traces the life of Frado, a Mulatto girl who grows up as an indentured servant to a white Massachusetts family, offering an enormous contribution to the study of black American literature and history.
With a New Introduction and Notes by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Richard J. Ellis A fascinating fusion of two literary models of the nineteenth century, the sentimental novel and the slave narrative, Our Nig, apart from its historical significance, is a deeply ironic and highly readable work, tracing the trials and tribulations of Frado, a mulatto girl abandoned by her white mother after the death of the child's black father, who grows up as an indentured servant to a white family in nineteenth-century Massachusetts. This definitive edition of Our Nig includes a new Introduction by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Richard J. Ellis and a set of appendices: "Harriet Wilson's Career as a Spiritualist"; "Hattie E. Wilson in the Banner of Light and Spiritual Scientist" a collection of her extant contributions to these newspapers; "Documents from Harriet Wilson's Life in Boston," and a compilation of primary source material relating to Wilson's identity. There is also a new chronology of the life of Harriet Wilson by Richard J. Ellis, as well as an up-to-date Select Bibliography of current scholarship regarding Harriet Wilson. This edition gives the fullest account to date of the life of Harriet Wilson, filling out many critical points regarding her life after writing Our Nig, in particular when she became a "medium" who communicated with the dead and as an educator in the "Spiritualist" movement after the Civil War.