Works by
Nella Larsen
(Writer)
[1893 - 1964]

• Fiction

• See also

Fiction

• Quicksand (1928)
  Born to a white mother and an absent black father, and despised for her dark skin, Helga Crane has long had to fend for herself. As a young woman, Helga teaches at an all-black school in the South, but even here she feels different. Moving to Harlem and eventually to Denmark, she attempts to carve out a comfortable life and place for herself, but ends up back where she started, choosing emotional freedom that quickly translates into a narrow existence.
  
  Quicksand, Nella Larsen's powerful first novel, has intriguing autobiographical parallels and at the same time invokes the international dimension of African American culture of the 1920s. It also evocatively portrays the racial and gender restrictions that can mark a life.

• Passing (1929)
  Clare Kendry leads a dangerous life. Fair, elegant, and ambitious, she is married to a white man unaware of her African American heritage, and has severed all ties to her past. Clare's childhood friend, Irene Redfield, just as light-skinned, has chosen to remain within the African American community, but refuses to acknowledge the racism that continues to constrict her family's happiness. A chance encounter forces both women to confront the lies they have told others-and the secret fears they have buried within themselves.
  
  Edited with an Introduction and Notes by Thadious M. Davis

• Quicksand and Passing (1986), Deborah E. McDowell, ed.
  Nella Larsen's novels Quicksand(1928) and Passing(1929) document the historical realities of Harlem in the 1920s and shed a bright light on the social world of the black bourgeoisie. The novel's greatest appeal and achievement, however, is not sociological, but psychological. As noted in the editor's comprehensive introduction, Larsen takes the them of psychic dualism, so popular in Harlem Renaissance fiction, to a higher and more complex level, displaying a sophisticated understanding and penetrating analysis of black female psychology.

• An Intimation of Things Distant:  The Collected Fiction of Nella Larsen (1992)
  Two novels and three short stories by "the mystery woman" of the Harlem Renaissance along with an incisive introduction by Charles R. Larson and a foreword by novelist Marita Golden. A unique and important anthology.

See also:

• When Harlem Was in Vogue (1981) by David Levering Lewis
  Tremendous optimism filled the streets of Harlem during the decade and a half following World War I. Langston Hughes, Eubie Blake, Marcus Garvey, Zora Neale Hurston, Paul Robeson, and countless others began their careers; Afro-America made its first appearance on Broadway; musicians found new audiences in the chic who sought out the exotic in Harlem's whites-only nightclubs; riotous rent parties kept economic realities at bay; and A'Lelia Walker and Carl Van Vechten outdid each other with glittering "integrated" soirees.
  When Harlem Was in Vogue recaptures the excitement of those times, displaying the intoxicating hope that black Americans could create important art and compel the nation to recognize their equality. In this critically-acclaimed study of race assimilation, David Levering Lewis focuses on the creation and manipulation of an arts and belles-lettres culture by a tiny Afro-American elite, striving to enhance "race relations" in America, and ultimately, the upward mobility of the Afro-American masses. He demonstrates how black intellectuals developed a systematic program to bring artists to
  Harlem, conducting nation-wide searches for black talent and urging WASP and Jewish philanthropists (termed "Negrotarians" by Zora Neale Hurston) to help support writers.
  
  This extensively-researched, fascinating volume reveals the major significance of the Renaissance as a movement which sprang up in Harlem but lent its mood to the entire era, and as a culturally-vital period whose after-effects continue to add immeasurably to the richness and character of
  American life.

• Invisible Darkness: Jean Toomer and Nella Larsen (1993) by Charles R. Larson

• Nella Larsen, Novelist of the Harlem Renaissance -- A Woman's Life Unveiled (1994) by Thadious M. Davis

• The Harlem Renaissance: Hub of African-American Culture, 1920-1930 (1995) by Steven Watson
  It was W.E.B. DuBois who paved the way with his essays and his magazine The Crisis, but the Harlem Renaissance was mostly a literary and intellectual movement whose best known figures include Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, and Jean Toomer.  Their work ranged from sonnets to modernist verse to jazz aesthetics and folklore, and their mission was race propaganda and pure art.  Adding to their visibility were famous jazz musicians, producers of all-black revues, and bootleggers.
  
  Now available in paperback, this richly-illustrated book contains more than 70 black-and-white photographs and drawings.  Steven Watson clearly traces the rise and flowering of this movement, evoking its main figures as well as setting the scene--describing Harlem from the Cotton Club to its literary salons, from its white patrons like Carl van Vechten to its most famous entertainers such as Duke Ellington, Josephine Baker, Ethel Waters, Alberta Hunter, Fats Waller, Bessie Smith, and Louis Armstrong among many others.  He depicts the social life of working-class speakeasies, rent parties, gay and lesbian nightlife, as well as the celebrated parties at the twin limestone houses owned by hostess A'Lelia Walker.  This is an important history of one of America's most influential cultural phenomenons.

• Women of the Harlem Renaissance (1995) by Cheryl A. Wall

• The Soul of a Woman (1997)
  Harriet E. Wilson, Jessie Redmond Fauset, Nella Larsen, Zora Neale Hurston and other great black women writers

• The Other Reconstruction: Where Violence and Womanhood Meet in the Writings of Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Angelina Weld Grimke, and Nella Larsen (1999) by Ericka M Miller
  The Other Reconstruction examines groundbreaking works by three African American women whose writings expose the economic, political, and social factors that sustained race violence in post-Reconstruction United States. Their works demonstrate that fixed representations--of race, gender, and class--are a prerequisite of tolerated interracial and intraracial violence. Ida B. Wells-Barnett's works challenge the "lynching narrative" and reveal that this violence depended upon the personal and political silence of women. Angelina Weld Grimke's short stories critique class-based strategies of Negro advancement as they expand conventional conceptions of race violence. Nella Larsen's novels explore the problems of cultural fixity. These writers' examination of the potential violence of fixed representations informs later acts of cultural expression as well as future liberation struggles.

• Acts of the imagination: Racial sentimentalism and the modern American novel (Frederick Douglass, Charles Waddell Chesnutt, Nella Larsen, Richard Wright) (2006) by Charles A. Walls
  The dissertation revivifies sentimentalism as both a literary and social phenomenon that exceeds the historical and generic parameters in which most scholars study it. Often viewed as the preponderance of excessive and stylized emotion, of pity and mourning, and of maternal and domestic reverence characteristic of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels, sentimentalism is more generally an explanation of how sympathy, which relies on an act of imagination, provides a fundamental basis for morality and social organization; sentimentalism is therefore a broad social phenomenon independent of its particular literary manifestations. The dissertation notes that the earliest formulations of sentimentalism maintained that the very capacity for sympathy was not a universal human trait and that its extension was blocked along racial lines. Calling this belief 'racial sentimentalism,' the dissertation charts this form of social sentimentalism in its various historical guises, which exist well into the twentieth century. Because racial sentimentalism involves limits on the extension of sympathy, it therefore racially qualified acts of imagination, led to the devaluation of African-American imaginative works and in turn supported black social exclusion. On the surface, noting this exclusion reaffirms the assumption that African-American novels were primarily a form of social protest that offered a proof of black humanity, often with appeals to sentimentality. However, the pervasiveness of racial sentimentalism in fact provoked a self-conscious use of the imagination and emotion as a way to theorize sentimentality and to interpret social life itself as sentimental. In chapters on Frederick Douglass, Charles Chesnutt, Nella Larsen, and Richard Wright, the dissertation describes the specific historical forms of racial sentimentalism and how each writer innovates literary form as they separate race from emotion but retain the vital connection between emotion and morality in modern American life. The dissertation concludes with the suggestion that, in the study of literature, the effects of racial sentimentalism exceeds primary literary works: racial sentimentalism legitimates assumptions about who studies or should study raced literatures and the assumption that such raced literature exits in the first place.

• Black Family (Dys)Function in Novels by Jessie Fauset, Nella Larson, & Fannie Hurst (2003) by Licia Morrow Calloway
  During the Harlem Renaissance, competing rhetorics of racial uplift centered upon concerns regarding class identification and the process of acculturation into American society. This book demonstrates how the practice of motherhood and the organization of household relations operated to address the pressing issues facing the black community of the early twentieth century. An exploration of such literary constructs as the tragic mulatto, the passing phenomenon, and the mammy result in a revitalized understanding of how the influences of racial intolerance, sexual oppression, and class ideology combined to provoke a model of resistant black maternity in the early modern era.

• Black Love And the Harlem Renaissance (The Novels of Nella Larsen, Jessie Redmon Fauset, And Zora Neale Hurston): An Essay in African American Literary Criticism (2005) by Portia Boulware Ransom

• Crimes of passing: The criminalization of blackness and miscegenation in United States passing narratives (Mark Twain, Nella Larsen, William Faulkner, James Weldon Johnson) (2006) by Susan Elaine Bausch

• In Search of Nella Larsen: A Biography of the Color Line (2006) by George Hutchinson
  Born to a Danish seamstress and a black West Indian cook in one of the Western Hemisphere's most infamous vice districts, Nella Larsen (1891-1964) lived her life in the shadows of America's racial divide. She wrote about that life, was briefly celebrated in her time, then was lost to later generations--only to be rediscovered and hailed by many as the best black novelist of her generation. In his search for Nella Larsen, the "mystery woman of the Harlem Renaissance," George Hutchinson exposes the truths and half-truths surrounding this central figure of modern literary studies, as well as the complex reality they mask and mirror. His book is a cultural biography of the color line as it was lived by one person who truly embodied all of its ambiguities and complexities.

  Author of a landmark study of the Harlem Renaissance, Hutchinson here produces the definitive account of a life long obscured by misinterpretations, fabrications, and omissions. He brings Larsen to life as an often tormented modernist, from the trauma of her childhood to her emergence as a star of the Harlem Renaissance. Showing the links between her experiences and her writings, Hutchinson illuminates the singularity of her achievement and shatters previous notions of her position in the modernist landscape. Revealing the suppressions and misunderstandings that accompany the effort to separate black from white, his book addresses the vast consequences for all Americans of color-line culture's fundamental rule: race trumps family.

• Not Our Memory: Contested visions of family at the turn of the American century (Henry James, Mark Twain, Charles Waddell Chesnutt, Pauline E. Hopkins, Nella Larsen) (2006) by Shannon L. C. Cate
  This project investigates the ways in which the trope of the “family” was deployed to consolidate a sense of U.S. national identity in five American novels: The American by Henry James, Pudd'nhead Wilson by Mark Twain, The Marrow of Tradition by Charles Chesnutt, Contending Forces by Pauline Hopkins and Passing by Nella Larsen. While the dominant ideology in this period wanted to claim “family” as a metaphor for unequal power relations imagined as nonetheless benevolent—such as paternalistic relations between imperial authorities and colonized subjects, or patriarchally inflected fraternal relations between races—many individuals and groups of Americans falling into the less powerful categories wielded the same trope of family to argue for a place of security and even equality or freedom for themselves and others on the margins. This work draws upon race theory, gender and class theory and queer theory to read the claims made by marginalized writers upon the dominant power structures of their contemporary cultures. Each chapter takes as its theme, some position within the bourgeois family to illuminate the writer's rhetorical project.

• This Damned Business of Colour': Passing in African American novels and memoirs (Charles Waddell Chesnutt, James Weldon Johnson, Nella Larsen, Shirlee ... Gregory Williams) -- Dissertation (2006) by Irina C., Negrea

• Women-Writing-Women: Three American responses to the Woman Question (Kate Chopin, Nella Larsen, Willa Cather) (2006) by Theresa Defrancis
  The Woman Question served as a catalyst in Kate Chopin's, Nella Larsen's, and Willa Cather's portrayal of the eroticized female body. The question evolved, in part, from Herbert Spencer's 1873 article “Psychology of the Sexes” and centered around Spencer's “theories” on woman's nature, her function, and her differences—biological, sexological, and sociological—from man. Chapter one historicizes the Woman Question by examining its influence in these three areas. The sciences, however, did not hold a monopoly on the debate. Rather, the question elicited reactions from many arenas—popular newspapers and magazines, literature, political cartoons, public policy—and in different forms—articles, music, caricatures, legislature. Throughout the decades of the question's popularity, open and subtle responses appeared. The aforementioned authors responded subtly. These women may not pointedly, purposely, or specifically integrate the Woman Question within their fiction; nevertheless, their literature contains an indirect reaction to the question and its aftermath through its portrayal of the female characters' sexuality. While other scholars have investigated the Woman Question through literature, ironically the focus tends to be on male authors' treatment of the debate. Also, British rather than American authors—both male and female—received more attention. An interrogation of American women's novels of the period adds scope and depth to the debate by broadening the perspective to include a segment heretofore marginalized: the American woman writer/character. All three authors examine woman's desire for personal independence enacted through her own sexuality, but each comes at this from a different perspective. Chapters two, three, and four analyze one novel by each author. Chopin's The Awakening introduces the literary study because it operates as a transitional text challenging the Cult of True Womanhood while simultaneously introducing the sexualized New Woman. In Larsen's Quicksand, the New Woman is conceptualized within a black female body, a body that boldly confronts racist notions of woman. Likewise, Cather questions heteropatriarchal hegemony through her eroticized, femininized landscape in O Pioneers! Although each author develops her heroine differently, all three construct strong female characters who energize the Woman Question debate, forcing a re-examination of it in ways ignored or unrealized before.