 Gray, for example, re-emphasizes that Crafts creates a heroine who is a young orphan woman, and who is literate and refined, as found in novels by Austen and Bronte.Henry Louis Gates, Jr. acquired the manuscript in 2001 in an annual auction by Swann Galleries.The catalogue described the novel as an "Unpublished Original Manuscript; a fictionalized biography, written in an effusive style, purporting to be the story, of the early life and escape of one Hannah Crafts."