In one of the most significant literary finds since the publication of Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig, Frances Smith Foster has rediscovered three novels by Frances E. W. Harper, the best known African-American woman writer of the nineteenth century. Originally serialized in issues of the Christian Recorder, the official journal of the A.M.E. Church, these novels are the first substantial body of fiction known to have been written for a specifically African-American audience.
They also correct the assumption that …
