**With a New Introduction and Notes by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and
Richard J. Ellis
**
A fascinating fusion of two literary models of the nineteenth century,
the sentimental novel and the slave narrative, Our Nig, apart from
its historical significance, is a deeply ironic and highly readable
work, tracing the trials and tribulations of Frado, a mulatto girl
abandoned by her white mother after the death of the child's black
father, who grows up as an indentured servant to a white family in
nineteenth-century Massachusetts.
This definitive edition of Our Nig includes a new Introduction by
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Richard J. Ellis and a set of appendices:
Harriet Wilson's Career as a Spiritualist; Hattie E. Wilson in the
Banner of Light and Spiritual Scientist a collection of her extant
contributions to these newspapers; Documents from Harriet Wilson's Life
in Boston, and a compilation of primary source material relating to
Wilson's identity. There is also a new chronology of the life of Harriet
Wilson by Richard J. Ellis, as well as an up-to-date Select Bibliography
of current scholarship regarding Harriet Wilson. This edition gives the
fullest account to date of the life of Harriet Wilson, filling out many
critical points regarding her life after writing Our Nig, in
particular when she became a medium who communicated with the dead and
as an educator in the Spiritualist movement after the Civil War.
