William Wells Brown’s Miralda and the Missing Issue No. 72 of the Weekly Anglo-African

Miralda; or The Beautiful Quadroon, a revised version of William Wells Brown’s novel Clotel (1853), was published serially in the Weekly Anglo-African from December 1860 to March 1861. While Clotel has garnered substantial critical attention, Miralda remains obscure, in part due to the fact that its first two installments have been lost. An article published in Washington, D.C.’s Evening Star in January 1861 offers a rare glimpse of this fragmentary text. The article documents the Weekly Anglo-African’s significance within the antebellum African American community; moreover, it offers a fresh perspective of Miralda as a double-voiced and rhetorically subversive text.