Harriet Wilson's New England

In the mid-nineteenth century, Harriet E. Wilson, an enterprising woman of mixed racial heritage, wrote an autobiographical novel describing the abuse and servitude endured by a young black girl in the supposedly free North. Originally published in Boston in 1859 and "lost" until its 1983 republication by noted scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Our Nig; or Sketches from the Life of a Free Black, is generally considered the first work of fiction written by an African American woman published in the United States. With this collection, the first devoted entirely to Wilson and her novel, the editors have compiled essays that seek to understand Wilson within New England and New England as it might have appeared to Wilson and her contemporaries. The contributors include prominent historians, literary critics, psychologists, librarians, and diversity activists. Harriet Wilson's New England joins other critical works in the emerging field known as the New Regionalism in resurrecting historically hidden ethnic communities in rural New England and exploring their erasure from public memory. It offers new literary and historical interpretations of Our Nig and responds to renewed interest in Wilson's dramatic account of servitude and racial discrimination in the North.

JERRIANNE BOGGIS is Director of the Harriet Wilson Project, a non-profit organization dedicated to raising awareness of Harriet Wilson and her literary work.

EVE ALLEGRA RAIMON is Associate Professor of Arts and Humanities at the University of Southern Maine and author of The "Tragic Mulatta" Revisited: Race and Nationalism in Nineteenth Century Antislavery Literature (2004).

BARBARA A. WHITE is Professor Emerita of Women's Studies at the University of New Hampshire and author of The Beecher Sisters (2003).

HENRY LOUIS GATES, JR., is W. E. B. Dubois Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University.