A few years back, Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina was in London, doing research on black women living in 18th- and 19th-century England, a follow-up to two previous books she’d written on Britain’s black population during that era.
The one-time aspiring novelist had instead become a biographer, having determined there were plenty of real stories to tell about people other historians had overlooked.
Indeed. Looking at a copy of a London newspaper from 1893, The Daily Telegraph, Gerzina, today the dean of the Commonwealth Honors College at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, was astonished to see an advertisement for a book by an American writer, Sarah E. Farro. The newspaper identified Farro as, “the first negro novelist.”
As it turned out, the novel, “True Love: A Story of English Domestic Life,” had also received attention from other British and U.S. newspapers of that time, and it had been part of a huge fair, — the World’s Columbian Exhibition — in Chicago that same year.
Trouble was, Gerzina, who has spent years researching forgotten or scarcely documented black lives, had never heard of the novel, or of Sarah Farro — and the world as a whole seemed largely to have forgotten both, as well.
“No one in my field,” Gerzina said during a recent interview at her UMass office, “had ever taught this book.”
If this was the first novel written by an African-American writer, or the first by an African-American woman, it would be a monumental discovery.
In fact, Gerzina realized immediately that neither of these cases were true: three African-American novelists, including one woman, published books earlier in the 19th century.
But as just the second novel published by a female African-American writer, “True Love” represents a key find, Gerzina says.
More importantly, the fact that it has nothing to do with the black experience — it’s a story of a white, upper-class English family of the 19th century — sheds new light on what black writers and readers of that era may have been interested in, she added.
“There’s long been an assumption that [19th-century black writers] wrote pretty much exclusively about race, about slavery and the struggle to exist in white society,” said Gerzina, who grew up in Springfield and is of mixed black and white parentage herself.
“I think we’ve also made assumptions about what other kinds of writing they would have been exposed to, what they might have been influenced by, what their level of education was,” she added.
The research Gerzina has done so far on Farro, for instance, indicates she read many of the popular English novelists of her era, such as Charles Dickens and William Thackery, which in turn likely influenced the subject matter of her novel.
Gerzina, who previously taught at Vassar, Barnard and Darmouth colleges, is also intrigued to think there may be other 19th-century African-American literary works left to find. As she wrote in Salon magazine last month, “Learning of a black woman whose race was documented, whose novel was published — but who disappeared in the historical record — can change how we think about African-American literature.”
Once she was back in the United States after her London discovery,Gerzina says she was able to track down just two copies of Farro’s novel in American libraries: one at the Harold Washington Library Center in Chicago and the other at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
The University of Illinois has since digitized the novel, which can be read online at bit.ly/292t3NX.
Gerzina also found and bought a copy of “True Love” on eBay. With something of a rueful smile, she says the novel’s real value is likely as a piece of history, describing it as “a bit of a potboiler,” in which a man’s quest to marry his true love is quashed by the woman’s selfish sister and mother.
“There are a few mistakes that give (Farro) away” as an American writing about English life, Gerzina says. There are references to the cost of things in dollars, rather than pounds, and the author also describes Thanksgiving as a holiday in Britain as well as America.
Gerzina adds, however, that the novel has some “perceptive moments” and that it’s clearly the work of a young writer who was “determined to make her mark.”
About Farro, not much is known — yet. She was born in Chicago in 1859 to a mother and father who had left the U.S. South, Gerzinasaid, and she apparently lived her whole life in or near the city. In 1937, at age 78, she was celebrated in a black newspaper, “The Chicago Defender,” for her novel and her long tenure in the city.
Gerzina says she’s tracked down the neighborhood where Farro grew up, however, and she’s continuing to dig into her history.
She’s proved a top researcher. Her 2008 book, “Mr. and Mrs. Prince,” unearthed the details of a Valley story that had been known mostly anecdotally: the 18th-century marriage and lives of Lucy Terry, a one-time slave in Deerfield and the first known African-American poet, and Abijah Prince, a former slave in Northfield. The couple later bought and farmed land in Vermont and withstood racism and other challenges there, successfully taking some of their fights to court.
The book, for which Gerzina’s husband, Anthony Gerzina, also did research, was nominated for several awards, including a Pulitzer Prize.
Gerzina’s other books include biographies of Francis Hodgson Burnett, author of the classic English children’s story “The Secret Garden,” and of the early 20th-century British painter Dora de Houghton Carrington, known primarily as “Carrington.”
She says it’s understandable that The Daily Telegraph in 1893 referred to Farro as “the first negro novelist.” Historians note that the work of the three black novelists published before her might not have been known, or possibly was ignored, by many white publishers and newspaper editors of the late 19th century. The books by two of those writers — William Wells Brown and Frank J. Webb — were known by black scholars in the 20th century, though the third novel, “Our Nig” by Harriet E. Wilson, was only rediscovered in the 1980s by Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr.
Gates also uncovered the manuscript of a fourth African-American novel, “The Bondwoman’s Narrative,” in 2001; the book became a bestseller after it was published in 2002. The author — Hannah Bond, whose pen name was Hannah Crafts — had escaped from slavery in North Carolina in the 1850s and fictionalized that experience in her novel, which was likely written between 1851 and 1863, experts say.
But with “True Love” now part of the conversation about 19th-century African-American novels, Gerzina hopes that conversation can be broadened to include things like African-American literary societies of the 19th and early 20th centuries, to see what other kinds of writing black authors may have drawn inspiration from.
It could lead to more unknown or forgotten African-American writers coming to the fore, she said: “The more the merrier.”