A digital scholarly edition that includes all versions of the book, published in 2006, at last made a full comparative reading possible. Traditional literary critics considered Brown’s overstuffed plots and extranarrative material a weakness, but modern readings see the four versions of Clotel as comprising an evolving whole. Ultimately, Brown removed Jefferson from the tale. Each one was published with a different title, in a different format, and for a different readership. Brown published three additional versions of Clotel in 1860–1861, 1864, and 1867. Brown hated Jefferson for writing the Declaration of Independence while also fathering slave children.

Brown hardly knew Virginia, but for him it represented all that was evil about the slave-owning United States-as did Jefferson, arguably Virginia’s most famous son. Clotel follows Jefferson’s fictional mistress, Currer, and her daughters, Clotel and Althesa, during and after their sale on the auction block in Richmond it also included documentary material-newspaper articles, notices, bills, posters, and advertisements-that contextualized his novel for a British readership that knew little about slavery. He based the book on the rumor that Thomas Jefferson fathered several children with his enslaved housekeeper, Sally Hemings-a rumor that DNA evidence and the historical record have since proved true. Brown, the son of an enslaved woman and her owner’s brother, escaped from slavery and was a lecturer on the abolition circuit in England when he published Clotel. It is considered the first African American novel. It is a founding text of the African American novelistic tradition, a brilliantly composed and richly detailed exploration of human relations in a new world in which race is a cultural construct.Clotel or the President’s Daughter: A Narrative of Slave Life in the United States by William Wells Brown was published in 1853 in London. A fast-paced and harrowing tale of slavery and freedom, of the hypocrisies of a nation founded on democratic principles, Clotel is more than a sensationalist novel. Escaping from the slave dealer, Clotel returns to Virginia disguised as a white man in order to rescue her daughter, Mary, a slave in her father’s house.

The Virginian who buys Clotel falls in love with her, gets her pregnant, seems to promise marriage-then sells her. The story begins with the auction of his mistress, here called Currer, and their two daughters, Clotel and Althesa. First published in December 1853, Clotel was written amid then unconfirmed rumors that Thomas Jefferson had fathered children with one of his slaves.