“The lack of widespread acknowledgement or recognition for Harriet E. Wilson, the first African American novelist and author of Our Nig (1859), comes as a surprise. A New Englander, Wilson reclaimed in her work the domestic, maternal, and liberating space of 19th-century women’s fiction. She constructed a fiction which in turn dismantles Frenchman of Letters Phillipe Vilain’s ‘autofiction’ definition with its requisite of the first-person.” – Zora