True Love: A Story of English Domestic Life (1891) is the first and only novel by Sarah E. Farro. Inspired by the works of Dickens and Thackeray, this novel models itself on the stories of romance and everyday life popular in Victorian England. When True Love: A Story of English Domestic Life appeared in print, Farro became the first black woman to publish a novel in the United States. Despite this distinction, her name and reputation would largely have faded into history if not for the effort of recent scholarship, which seeks to restore her status as a pioneering African American woman while contextualizing her work within the study of Victorian literature. Mrs. Brewster is an unhappy woman. A carpenter’s daughter, she spent years in poverty before receiving a sizable inheritance from a distant relative, granting her and her two daughters a minimum of stability for the first time in their lives. Despite this, she endures an abusive, joyless marriage to a merchant tailor and longs