Jefferson was the father of six children with Hemings; four survived to adulthood, and he gave all their freedom.) The novel was first published in England, where Brown lived for several years. Frank J. Webb's 1857 novel, The Garies and Their Friends, was also published in England, with prefaces by Harriet Beecher Stowe and Henry, Lord Brougham. It was the first African-American fiction to portray passing, that is, a mixed-race person deciding to identify as white rather than black. It also explored northern racism, in the context of a brutally realistic race riot closely resembling the Philadelphia race riots of 1834 and 1835. The first novel published in the United States by an African-American woman was Harriet Wilson's Our Nig (1859). It expressed the difficulties of lives of northern free Blacks. Our Nig was rediscovered and republished by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., in the early 1980s. He labeled the work fiction and argued that it may be the first novel published by an African American. Parallels between Wilson's narrative and her life have been discovered, leading some scholars to argue that the work should be considered autobiographical. Despite these disagreements, Our Nig is a literary work which speaks to the difficult life of free blacks in the North who were indentured servants. Our Nig is a counter-narrative to the forms of the sentimental novel and mother-centered novel of the 19th century. Another recently discovered work of early African-American literature is The Bondwoman's Narrative, which was written by Hannah Crafts between 1853 and 1860. Crafts was a fugitive slave from Murfreesboro, North Carolina. If her work was written in 1853, it would be the first African-American novel written in the United States. The novel was published in 2002 with an introduction by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. The work was never published during Crafts' lifetime. Some suggest that she did not have entry into the publishing world. The novel has been described as a style between slave narratives and the sentimental novel. In her novel, Crafts went beyond the genre of the slave narrative. There is some evidence that she read in the library of her master and was influenced by those works: the narrative was serialized and bears resemblances to Charles Dickens' style.– Many critics are still attempting to decode its literary significance and establish its contributions to the study of early African-American literature. Slave narratives A genre of African-American literature