The Clotel/Miralda/Clotelle, so revealed, evolving as history evolved, shows itself to be a masterpiece of the nineteenth-century American novel. An electronic scholarly edition created in 2006 unites the four versions in a hypertext that embeds each version in its original epitext. Opening with the auction of Currer, the supposed mistress of Thomas Jefferson, and their two daughters, Clotel and Althesa. Brown was born in slavery in Kentucky and escaped to freedom at the age of 20. Reception was hampered by the fact that many critics believed the version they were reading was the only version, and the different versions were regularly treated as separate novels. Clotel orThePresidents Daughter(1853), the first published novel by an African American, has recently emerged as a canonical text for courses in African. First published in London, Clotel or, The President’s Daughter (1853) by William Wells Brown is considered the first novel by an African-American. Slave women heroines, white in appearance, led Black militant critics in the 1970s to find the novel insufficiently Black. The story evolves from an abolitionist novel to a post-abolitionist romance, radically changing each time. Brown published three further versions of Clotel: as Miralda in 1860, as Clotelle in 1864 and as Clotelle again in 1867. William Wells Brown’s Clotel or the President’s Daughter (London, 1853) gives a fictive account of the slave daughters and granddaughters of Thomas Jefferson.
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