[1] The 2002 publication includes a preface by Henry Louis Gates Jr., professor of African-American literature and history at Harvard University, describing his buying the manuscript, verifying it, and research to identify the author.

In September 2013, Gregg Hecimovich, a professor of English at Winthrop University, documented the novelist as Hannah Bond, who later adopted her pen name, Crafts, an African-American slave who escaped about 1857 from the plantation of Wheeler in Murfreesboro, North Carolina.

The novel opens by narrating how Hannah grew up on a plantation in Virginia, where she was taught as a child to read and write by Aunt Hetty, a kind old white woman, who was subsequently discovered and reprimanded, as the education of slaves was supposed to be limited.

The novel shows that Hannah Crafts was aware of and influenced by the popular literary trends of the day and major works by British novelists.

Henry Louis Gates Jr. found that her master John Hill Wheeler's library was filled with works of contemporary fiction.

Literary scholar Hollis Robbins first observed that Crafts must have read Charles Dickens' Bleak House[5] (although this was not included on Wheeler's library list), Walter Scott's Rob Roy, and Scientific American.

Robbins has written that Crafts may have read a serialized version of Dickens' novel in Frederick Douglass's Paper, which had a high circulation among fugitive slaves.

In total, Gates and Robbins document that Crafts echoes or lifts passages from a remarkably impressive range of English and American literature, including Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto, Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, Walter Scott's Rob Roy and Redgauntlet, Thomas Campbell's Life and Letters, Dickens's Old Curiosity Shop and Bleak House, Felicia Heman's poetry, John Gauden's Discourse on Artificial Beauty, William Wirt's Life of Patrick Henry, Shakespeare's Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra, Michel Chevalier's Society, Manners and Politics in the United States and Phillis Wheatley's To a Lady on the Death of Her Husband, as well as Douglass's Narrative and Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin.

[3]Gregg Hecimovich of Winthrop University, who in 2013 documented the author as Hannah Bond, learned that girls from a nearby school often boarded at the Murfreesboro plantation where she worked as a lady's maid for Ellen Wheeler.

[10] Important scholarly work published after In Search of Hannah Crafts includes: Other recent scholarship builds upon existing findings.

Gray, for example, re-emphasizes that Crafts creates a heroine who is a young orphan woman, and who is literate and refined, as found in novels by Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë.

The catalogue described the novel as an "Unpublished Original Manuscript; a fictionalized biography, written in an effusive style, purporting to be the story, of the early life and escape of one Hannah Crafts."

Joe Nickell, Ph.D., the author of numerous books on literary assessment, used a variety of techniques to evaluate the manuscript, studying the paper, ink, provenance, writing style, etc.

[20] In addition, she demonstrates insider knowledge of specifics regarding slave escape routes; and makes numerous conventional mistakes in language.

[19] Henry Louis Gates, Jr. noted that Crafts referred to historical figures and actual places in her novel; among those were the Cosgroves, found in the Virginia census; Mr. Henry, a Presbyterian minister in Stafford County, Virginia; and Jane Johnson, a slave from John H. Wheeler's Washington, DC household, who gained freedom in 1855 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (a free state).

Learning that Jane Johnson lived in Boston, Katherine E. Flynn, a scientist and skilled genealogist, began to research her life.

In addition to being able to document major life events for Johnson after she reached Boston, Flynn concluded that she might have been Hannah Crafts, as her novel appeared to have been written by someone close to the John Hill Wheeler household.

[24] In 2003, Gates and Hollis Robbins published In Search of Hannah Crafts about their research on this topic, as well as more on the literary influences found in the novel.