Despite not actually being an autobiography, the text does offer an account of the types of trials faced by many slaves and remains a powerful anti-slavery narrative. The novel centers around a female slave, Ann, who tells her tale in much the same way that a slave in an authentic slave narrative would: the first-person narrator begins by describing her childhood and then moves chronologically through her struggles. Following the death of her father, Miss Jane marries a Mr. Summerville and she takes Ann with her when she moves to an unnamed city. When Miss Jane demands that Ann be punished for alleged impudence, Mr. Summerville takes her to the barkeeper for a whipping, declaring that "Gentlemen do not correct negroes; But Henry finds a buyer for Ann at the last possible moment, getting a Mr. Moodwell to secure her for his sister, Miss Nancy. Miss Nancy is an invalid who requires much care, but she is kind and treats Ann as an equal, giving her a bedroom, sharing her inner thoughts, and allowing her to see Henry. Because Ann does not wish to leave Miss Nancy without proper care, Miss Nancy agrees to settle wherever Ann and Henry chose to live. She even gives Henry the last remaining installment on his freedom. Tragically, Ann and Henry's plans are foiled when Ann's nemesis, Lindy, re-enters the narrative.
Perhaps the most intriguing element of Crafts' The Bondwoman's Narrative is its ability to confound readers who insist on defining it quickly and succinctly. Although much of The Bondwoman's Narrative is widely recognized as fiction, the text claims historicity, shares many features with autobiographical slave narratives of the day, and references historical individuals both of great fame and of abject obscurity. A convincing case for Crafts' blackness can be made that would likely satisfy most critics. However, just as the text's heroine, Hannah, is described as "almost white" and can escape slavery by passing for white, Crafts' racial attitudes in The Bondwoman's Narrative reflect a hybridity of black perspectives and internalized white prejudices. Also significant within The Bondwoman's Narrative is the hybridity of Crafts' attitudes on the North and on religion. At the same time, Crafts faces the task of reconciling her affirmation of the Christian faith with her condemnation of its misuse to support slavery and racism. The concept of hybridity within The Bondwoman's Narrative is also significant in the tension between Crafts' construction of a text seemingly unlike anything else known to literary studies and her extensive borrowing of such other literary works as Dickens' Bleak House. These relationships in Crafts, according to Robbins, add a further hybridity in a narrative voice beyond that of either the protagonist or a disembodied narrator alone, creating "a hybrid or poly vocal character" and "an emergent and merging moment of consciousness". Just as Hannah eludes her pursuers as a fugitive slave toward the end of Crafts' narrative, The Bondwoman's Narrative itself eludes simple descriptors.
Today, her autobiography is regarded as the most in-depth slave narrative written by a black woman in America. Her discovery uncovered other events in her life after 1861 – she worked as a clerk for the New England Women’s Club and operated a boarding house that catered to students and faculty at Harvard University. She served as a relief worker during the Civil War and worked among the needy freedpeople in Washington, DC. Elizabeth Keckley (1818-1907) Born in Dinwiddie Court House, Virginia, Elizabeth Keckley was the child of an enslaved woman and her owner. After several unhappy years with Robert Burwell and his family, Keckley was sent to live in St. Louis, Missouri with Anne Burwell Garland, a married daughter of the Burwells. In St. Louis, Missouri in the early 1850s, Mrs. Garland hired Elizabeth out as a seamstress, which was a stroke of luck. In her 1868 memoir Behind the Scenes, Or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House (1868), Keckley describes how she bought her freedom from the Garland family in November 1855. After two failed marriages, Elizabeth Keckley settled in Washington, DC in 1860. A graduate of Oberlin College, she was hired at Wilberforce University (both schools are in Ohio) in 1858 as the first African American woman college instructor. Wilberforce closed for two years during the Civil War after losing most of its nearly 200 subscription students – wealthy planters from the South withdrew their mostly mixed-race children once the war began. The Cincinnati Methodist Conference was called upon to care for soldiers and their families and could not offer its previous level of financial support