Abandoned by her white mother after her Black father’s death, the child Frado is left with the Bellmont family in a two-story white house in New England. There she labours as a servant and endures years of beatings from Mrs. Bellmont, finding comfort only in a few sympathetic members of the household. Wilson wrote to support herself and her son, and tells the story partly as her own.
Published in 1859 and rediscovered by Henry Louis Gates Jr. in the 1980s, it is among the earliest novels by an African American woman. Download the free EPUB.