One of them is the Clotel of the title, who suffers various trials and eventually escapes her captors. In this first Clotel Brown gives Jefferson two fictional daughters, both of whom are sold at the auction block. This original version, intended for an English audience, had as its starting point the persistent rumors that Thomas Jefferson had fathered the children of an enslaved Virginia woman. The result was Clotel or, The President’s Daughter: A Narrative of Slave Life in the United States. He had already published works of nonfiction, but the tremendous success of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (serialized in 1851 and published as a novel in 1852) inspired him to try his hand at fiction. Reluctant to return home after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, Brown remained in England for several years.

He became a popular lecturer at anti-slavery meetings and in 1849 undertook a lecture tour of England. From Clotelle or, The Colored Heroineīy the 1840s Brown was living in New York and was active in the American abolitionist movement. William took his surnames from an Ohio Quaker man who assisted his escape. Brown, a Fugitive Slave, he made his way through Ohio and finally to freedom in Canada. As he later recounted in his 1847 memoir Narrative of William W. It was from one of these voyages that William managed to escape in 1834. As was common practice, he was also rented out as temporary help to others, including a slave trader who regularly transported enslaved people down the Mississippi from St. Louis, and young William was put to work at various tasks.

His father was a white relative of his mother’s owner, Dr. William Wells Brown (1814-1884) was born in Kentucky to an enslaved woman named Elizabeth. This is the fourth and last version published and the only one in which the Civil War and its immediate aftermath are addressed. ZSR Special Collections recently purchased a copy of the 1867 edition, titled Clotelle or, The Colored Heroine. Brown’s novel was reissued four times over the next fifteen years, and with each edition the author made changes to the characters and the narrative. When William Wells Brown’s Clotel or, The President’s Daughter appeared in London in 1853, it was the first novel ever published by an African American author.

Illustration from William Wells Brown’s Clotelle or, The Colored Heroine

Clotel by william wells brown