A historical novel โ not a biography โ reimagining the two women who shared Frederick Douglass's Rochester household. Anna Murray Douglass, the free Black laundress who helped him escape slavery, married him, bore his five children, and kept his home for forty-four years, watches her marriage's center of gravity shift to Ottilie Assing, the German-Jewish intellectual who became Douglass's companion of the mind โ and, for nearly three decades, his mistress under Anna's roof. Rhodes tells the story through the uneasy solidarity of the two women themselves.
Author: Jewell Parker Rhodes ยท Original publisher: Atria Books (New York), 2002
