Winner of the 1979 Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize
for best novel by an American woman

“The relationship must have been much as the author depicts it in this fine first novel: a mixture of love and hate, of tenderness and cruelty and of freedom and bondage. Well researched, well written, insightful, and entertaining.”

—Library Journal

“[An] extremely affecting and poetic first novel. Even if historical fact and careful supposition were not the story’s basis, the Jefferson-Hemings relationship the novelist has imagined would be unforgettable.”

—New Republic

“A bold undertaking. . . . Her novelistic abilities are impressive: She writes with grace and force and has an eye for detail and an ear for dialogue, a sense of scene, and a capacity to create believable, interesting characters. . . . Intelligently, even brilliantly, imagined.”

—Larry McMurtry, New York Magazine

“Barbara Chase-Riboud’s well-written first novel is deservedly a major publishing event.”

—U.S. News & World Report

“Chase-Riboud, an unusually gifted writer, has taken a stunning historical idea and made it sing with life. The characters and settings—the Hemings family and the Jefferson of Paris and Monticello—are vivid. Sally Hemings is a beautiful novel: the writing is eloquent, the story haunting.”

—Grand Rapids Press

“As a first novel this book is truly extraordinary. Barbara Chase-Riboud has done a masterful job of bringing Sally Hemings to life. Clean, assertive, straightforward prose draws the reader immediately into the imagined soul of Sally Hemings—an exciting trip, one I found well worth taking.”

—The Tennessean

“A sensitive, elegant and informative novel which I read with fascination and urge without qualification.”

—John Kenneth Galbraith, author of The Affluent Society

“Haunting … powerful and touching.”

—Denver Post

“Exquisitely crafted … a sensitive life study of a truly exceptional woman: complex, courageous, irresistibly attractive.”

—Cosmopolitan

“The Thomas Jefferson-Sally Hemings legend is as deeply embedded in American mythology as John Henry. Barbara Chase-Riboud has captured all of the power, pain and ironic beauty which make the legend persist. It is a very moving and human novel.”

—Nathan Huggins, author of Black Odyssey

“Barbara Chase-Riboud knows a great deal about black and white in the American South, the complexity, the range, the horrors, the occasional humanity of that relationship. This is a wise and compassionate book; its very anger is full of understanding.”

—Kate Millett, author of Sexual Politics

“Barbara Chase-Riboud is a consummate artist. She invites the reader to consider if resistance and submission can be employed as instruments to live through hazardous times. In a startling book, Chase-Riboud has shown us the cruelty of slavery and the romance of love. . . . She has determined to keep us honest about history and give us a great read.”

—Maya Angelou

“The sense of Jefferson as a man is remarkable. Sally Hemings is noble and mysterious—a female cult object.”

—Mary McCarthy, author of The Group

“Barbara Chase-Riboud’s novel Sally Hemings … probably has been the single greatest influence shaping the public’s attitude about the Jefferson-Hemings story. . . . It was the book’s presentation of Hemings’s humanity, by telling the story from her point of view and giving her an inner monologue based on common emotions, that caused the biggest problem for Jefferson defenders. Hemings was portrayed as a person with actual thoughts and conflicts, giving her a depth of character seldom attributed to American slaves or to black people in general. She became real—and the possibility of the relationship became real—once she was taken seriously and presented as a full human being.”

—Annette Gordon-Reed, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings:
An American Controversy