Brown begins with a slave auction in Richmond, where Currer and her daughters Clotel and Althesa, said to be the children of Thomas Jefferson, are sold apart. Clotel is bought by a young Virginian who promises her love, but his marriage and her mistress’s cruelty set her on a desperate course through the slave South, told alongside newspaper clippings, sermons and anti-slavery testimony.
Published in London in 1853 by a man who had escaped slavery, and generally regarded as the first novel by an African American. Download the free EPUB.