A Miserable Revenge: A Story of Life in Virginia

by George A. Newman Sr.; Co-editors: Mollie Godfrey, Brooks E. Hefner, Jeslyn Pool, Evan Sizemore

In the mid-1870s, a young African American educator arrived in Harrisonburg, Virginia, where he wrote a novel about antebellum life in the Shenandoah Valley. George A. Newman’s A Miserable Revenge: A Story of Life in Virginia appears here in print for the first time, nearly 150 years after its composition. The earliest known example of a “white life” novel—a Black-authored novel about white protagonists—A Miserable Revenge is set in and around Winchester, Virginia, in the 1840s. It draws on the sensationalist conventions of popular fiction of the time to spin a story of dark secrets, lost relatives, mistaken identities, crime and detection, and romance. In the novel, Newman describes the relationship between free and enslaved Black Virginians, drawing on his experience as a free Black child indentured to a white landowner in Winchester before the Civil War. Newman’s novel is a welcome addition to the slim corpus of nineteenth-century African American literature, and is one of a handful of examples written and set in Virginia. This edition includes two essays and two poems by Newman, along with several critical and contextual essays by Virginia-based scholars.