Claire de Duras

A Senegalese girl is bought as an infant and raised in a Paris salon as an aristocrat's ward - loved, educated, and then old enough to notice that no one will marry her. Claire de Duras lost her father to the guillotine and wrote this in 1823 from inside the society she is describing; it is the first French novel to give a black woman a mind and a voice, and it was a sensation.