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Loading... The Bondwoman's Narrativeby Hannah Crafts
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book.  HomeGirlQuel | Apr 14, 2009 |  I bought this in a fit of interest. It didn't hold up. Somethings are better in theory than in fact. (  ) timspalding | Jun 13, 2008 | I enjoyed this book, but would have edited/arranged it differently. Gates left in Crafts' strikeouts, misspellings, and grammar errors (for historical reasons). I understand his reasoning, and it was interesting to see some of the thought processes that went into the book, but it took a while to get used to. I'd read the strike outs in a sentence, then read the sentence as intended, then think about the differences that made in the meaning of the sentence - then I'd forget where I was and have to do it all over again. I would have preferred the novel to be presented first, in a polished form, with the historical notes and information about the edits following. I did enjoy reading how the manuscript was discovered and the things Gates did to try and find the author. It's really a neat story - and a historically important work. The podcast of Gates that I found was more about identifying the author of this book. Gates is a captivating speaker; I'd have loved having him for my history professor in college. (  ) dulcibelle | Feb 15, 2008 | mortaine | Jan 9, 2008 | Assigned in college, wonderful moving story. (  ) Elizabeth.Michele | Oct 11, 2007 |  no reviews | add a review
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If Gates is right (his introduction and appendix should convince just about everyone), The Bondwoman's Narrative is a tremendous discovery. But is it a lost masterpiece? No. The novel draws so heavily on the conventions of mid-19th-century fiction--by turns religious, gothic, and sentimental--that it does not have much flavor of its own. The beginning of chapter 13 is a close paraphrase (virtually a cribbing) of the opening of Dickens's Bleak House. This borrowing seems to have escaped Gates, although he does quote the assessment of one scholar, the librarian Dorothy Porter Wesley, who had owned the manuscript before he acquired it, that "the best of the writer's mind was religious and emotional and in her handling of plot the long arm of coincidence is nowhere spared." Although not a striking literary contribution, The Bondwoman's Narrative is well worth reading on historical grounds, especially since it was never published. As Gates argues, these pages provide our first "unedited, unaffected, unglossed, unaided" glimpse into the mind of a fugitive slave. --Regina Marler
(retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:05 -0400)
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The novel d'audio is really interesting. Strange though, 'cause I'm sure I'd enjoHannahcrafts_5y it more if I got to make up the voices of the characters in my head. You know what I mean? It's kinda spoiled it for me a little...like seeing the movie before reading the book. I feel like I still want to actually read the book for the full effect. Plus the lady who's telling the story is quite obviously from Canada, or wherever else "about" is pronounced "aboot".
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