author
Sarah E. Farro
b. 1859
One of the earliest known African American women novelists, she published the rare 1891 book True Love: A Story of English Domestic Life in Chicago. Much of her life remains elusive, which gives her surviving work an unusual sense of discovery.
1 Audiobook
True Love: A Story of English Domestic Life
by Sarah E. Farro
About the author
Born in Illinois around 1859, Sarah E. Farro was an African American novelist whose life is only partly documented. Census records and later historical work place her family in Chicago, where her parents had moved from the South.
Farro is known for a single surviving novel, True Love: A Story of English Domestic Life, published in 1891 by Donohue & Henneberry. That book has made her notable as one of the very few known Black American novelists to publish a novel in the 19th century.
What makes Farro especially interesting is how much is still unknown. Scholars have been able to recover some details of her background, but no confirmed portrait appears to survive, and no other novel is known. Even so, her place in literary history has steadily grown as readers and researchers have rediscovered her work.