Foreword.

The recent publication of The Curse of Caste; or The Slave Bride in book form for the first time challenges all who are interested in 19th-century African American literary history to take a fresh look at the story of black women's writing that we've been piecing together over the last quarter century. The particular chapter that The Curse of Caste will help us re-conceive is the key 10-year stretch in the evolution of African American women's narratives from 1859 to 1869. The Curse of Caste helps us see more clearly than ever how African American women writers moved from what we might call today creative non-fiction into fully-fledged works of fiction.

Twenty-five years ago we began to receive the first indications from Jean Fagan Yellin's early research suggesting that Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), considered by many scholars to have been a novel written by its white editor, Lydia Maria Child, was actually the self-authored autobiography of a black woman, Harriet Jacobs. Hard on the heels of these discoveries came Henry Louis Gates's paradigm-shifting revelation that Our Nig (1859), a book of which most scholars of African American literature were unaware, was actually the product of the pen of a formerly indentured African American servant, Harriet Wilson. Suddenly the long-standing lacuna in African American women's narrative history between the Narrative of Sojourner Truth (1850) and Frances Ellen Watkins's Iola Leroy (1892)--which most of us thought was the earliest novel by an African American woman--began to close. The two emergent texts by Jacobs and Wilson intrigued and spurred us to look more carefully at the way that autobiography in the hands of black women gradually morphed into fiction in the middle of the century.

By the end of the 1980s Our Nig and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl had entered the canon of African American women's narrative as foundational texts, the former adjudged the first novel and the latter the first autobiography "written by herself." In the early 1990s Frances Smith Foster pointed scholarship in a new direction by bringing back into print three serialized novels by Harper, all of them antedating Iola Leroy. The earliest of the three, Minnie's Sacrifice, appeared in the Christian Recorder in 1869, only a decade after the appearance of Our Nig. In 2001 Foster brought to the forefront another important, though long neglected, black woman's narrative of the 1860s, Elizabeth Keckley's Behind the Scenes, or, Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House (1868).

How does the recent publication of The Curse of Caste enhance our appreciation of the remarkable literary experimentation in autobiography, fiction, and hybrid blends of both undertaken by African American women between Our Nig in 1859 and Minnie's Sacrifice in 1869? In the Introduction to the Oxford University Press edition of The Curse of Caste, I propose several ways that a full appreciation of Julia Collins's literary enterprise obliges us to think a second time about the adequacy of the story we have constructed of black women's literary history at midcentury. The illuminating and provocative essays on The Curse of Caste and a variety of other notable midcentury African American women's texts published In this special issue of African American Review exemplify the kind of re-evaluation and reconception that are essential to forming a truly vital literary history. Congratulations to editors Joycelyn Moody, AAR editor, and Veta Tucker, special guest editor, and, of course, to all those whose work has made this issue one of the most original special issues of African American Review yet to be published.

William L. Andrews is the E. Maynard Adams Professor of English and Senior Associate Dean for Fine Arts and Humanities at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His most recent book, North Carolina Slave Narratives, was published in 2006 (U of North Carolina P).