Geoffrey Sanborn's edition of Clotel highlights the complexity of the novel's composition and its place in 19th-century print and performance culture.

Clotel: The Presidents Daughter is a fictional story that plays to the well-known rumor starting in the 19th century that Thomas Jefferson had fathered several children with Sally Hemings, a woman whom he had enslaved. The children were described to be nearly white in physical description. Sally Hemings was believed to be the half-sister of Jefferson wife. Set in the early19th century the novel considers slavery's catastrophic effects on African-American families, the difficult lives of mixed race people, and the degraded and immoral condition of the relationship between the enslaver and the...