True Love: A Story of English Domestic Life (1891) is the first and only novel by Sarah E. Farro. Inspired by the works of Dickens and Thackeray, this novel models itself on the stories of romance and everyday life popular in Victorian England. When True Love: A Story of English Domestic Life appeared in print, Farro became the first black woman to publish a novel in the United States. Despite this distinction, her name and reputation would largely have faded into history if not for the effort of recent scholarship, which seeks to restore her status as a pioneering African American woman while contextualizing her work within the study of Victorian literature. Mrs. Brewster is an unhappy woman. A carpenter’s daughter, she spent years in poverty before receiving a sizable inheritance from a distant relative, granting her and her two daughters a minimum of stability for the first time in their lives. Despite this, she endures an abusive, joyless marriage to a merchant tailor and longs for a way to escape middle class life. When her daughter Janey becomes engaged to a wealthy aristocrat, Mrs. Brewster grows hopeful of the opportunity to tie herself to her fate. Not far from the Brewster home, Charles Taylor lives in an ornately decorated mansion. Having inherited a large sum from his capitalist father, he leads a boring, luxurious existence. For Taylor, marriage is a matter of romance, a bond between a man and a woman with no economic significance whatsoever. For Mrs. Brewster, her daughter is “worth her weight in gold.” This edition of Sarah E. Farro’s True Love: A Story of English Domestic Life is a classic of African American literature reimagined for modern readers.

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