Why Hasn’t Harriet Wilson, the First Black Female Novelist, Been Given Her Due?
Her wider appeal may have been jeopardized because she wrote characters that broke commonly-held stereotypes of White Northerners and Southerners
The lack of widespread acknowledgement or recognition for Harriet E. Wilson, the first African American novelist and author of Our Nig (1859), comes as a surprise. A New Englander, Wilson reclaimed in her work the domestic, maternal, and liberating space of 19th century women’s fiction. She constructed a fiction which in turn dismantles Frenchman of Letters Phillipe Vilain’s “autofiction” definition with its requisite of the first-person.
Wilson’s lucid, third person literary subversion distinguished her from contemporaries. Surrounding the Our Nig blueprint were the slave narratives of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs, the freewoman autobiography of Nancy Prince, and the Gothic bildungsroman of Charlotte Bronte (Jane Eyre), and Hannah Webster Foster’s The Coquette. But Our Nig is Harriet Wilson, as author and as enigmatic character.
Once described as “the earnest and eloquent colored trance medium,” Wilson (née Adams, née Green), was born in Milford, New Hampshire, in 1825, to Margaret Smith of Irish descent, and…
