Conclusion
This concluding chapter turns to a new, yet old, slave fiction: Hannah Crafts' The Bondwoman's Narrative(2002). According to its editor, the novel was written by a female fugitive slave in the 1850s, though it was never published during the author's lifetime. The book's gripping, visceral depictions of slave life and an escape to the North are familiar to readers of the slave narratives. From here, the chapter returns to the tension between history and fiction that was raised in the introduction. By doing so, the chapter considers Crafts' novel not as historical fact but as a slave fiction, a form that presents experience through the eyes of a slave. This perspective, fictional though it may be, offers readers today insights into the past that was not, for various reasons, contained by historical accounts of slavery.