This previously unpublished manuscript, clearly written in the 1850s, was recently bought by Harvard’s Henry Louis Gates (no relation); he thinks it may be the first novel by an African-American woman. And if Crafts was who she claims to be in the book, it’s the only novel we have by a female fugitive slave. Gates hasn’t yet tracked down the real-life Crafts–he has candidates–but his introduction (and the appended report by a document specialist) leaves no doubt of its age. And both physical and textual evidence–thimble marks on paste wafers; the presentation of black characters–leave little doubt that a black woman wrote it. Gates writes that while white abolitionists massaged most pre- Civil War works by African-Americans, in Crafts we hear “the unadulterated ‘voice’ of the fugitive slave herself, exactly as she wrote and edited it.” (He reproduces her spelling, punctuation and crossings-out.) So, just what I wanted: literature in the raw, without preconceptions, by a novelist freshly inventing the genre as she wrote.

But did Crafts really intend this to be a novel? On her title page she calls it a “narrative”; in a preface she says it’s a “record of plain unvarnished fact” that “makes no pretensions to romance.” True, novels from “Moll Flanders” to “Lolita” make similar claims, but there’s never a hint she’s playing games. Since “The Bondwoman’s Narrative” has preposterous coincidences and overwrought melodrama, obviously derived from Gothic and sentimental fiction, you might be tempted to read her disclaimer of “romance” as modernist playfulness before its time. But it’s possible the book began as a memoir, somehow took wing into literary fancy and never landed in any recognizable genre. Just because a story has stock characters and situations–the kindly or coldhearted white people, the brutal overseer, the pursuit by dogs–doesn’t mean it’s not substantially true. And the convincing domestic details, as well as a real-life slaveholder (one John Wheeler) who appears by name, suggest Crafts certainly knew, and probably lived, something like the life she describes.

While the writing is mostly sub-amateurish and much of the dialogue–“Begone, I want none of your blarney”–inadvertently reads like Donald Barthelme, Crafts could be a sharp observer of character. The infuriating Mrs. Wheeler chatters confidentially at her “servants,” unaware that they fear and loathe her; the sinister lawyer Trappe blandly philosophizes at the slaves he persecutes: “We are all slaves to something or somebody.” But why did she take it into her head to plagiarize from “Bleak House”? Trappe is a knockoff of Dickens’s Tulkinghorn; Crafts’s resolution to be “industrious, cheerful and true-hearted, to do some good though in a humble way, and to win some love if I could” is cribbed from Dickens’s narrator, Esther Summerson. (Esther strives to be “industrious, contented and kind-hearted, and to do some good to some one, and win some love to myself if I could.”) Crafts also had the prescience to appropriate the now canonical passages describing the mud in London and the death of Jo the crossing sweeper. Were these ripoffs? (In the story, Crafts is so honest she refuses to pass for white to gain her freedom.) Or quirky tributes? Or what? This supposedly pure and simple writer begins to look more and more like just another overthinker–unless it’s me–with a contemporary taste for artifice, duplicity and complexity. If the spirit of Hannah Crafts is hovering nearby, reading over my shoulder, I just want to know: Who were you? What were you thinking?