Four years out of college (and finally having most of my books in one place), I am rediscovering some of the great literature I was exposed to at Barnard. For one of my senior thesis classes, I took this amazing class, Black Images and Stereotypes in Literature and the Arts. A few months ago I was looking at my bookcase and came across an author we touched on briefly in class: Nella Larsen.

Nella Larsen was part of a group of female Harlem Renaissance authors whose work was considered ‘lost’ before the 1970’s—and even after re-discovery, Larsen’s novels are often overshadowed by major players. Larsen was the first black female creative writer to be honored with a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1930 to do research on a novel in Spain and France. The characters and story lines she penned are direct reflections of herself and her upbringing—this was a woman who was not afraid to pour her personal life into her fictitious novels.

Nella Larsen, born in Chicago in 1891, was the daughter of a Danish woman and a black West Indian man who died when she was young. She spent most of her life interacting within Danish and German social circles until she was introduced to Harlem’s literary elite in 1919 when she married Elmer Samuel Imes, a successful black research physicist.

During the 1920’s, Larsen was encouraged to publish her writing by many influential movers and shakers in New York’s art scene—especially Carl Van Vechten who introduced the to his publisher, Knopf. Larsen’s first novel Quicksand (Knopf, 1928) catapulted the talented author into a huge success, earning her a Bronze Medal in recognition of Distinguished Achievement Among Negroes in Literature from the Harmon Foundation.

Quicksand is a story about Helga Crane, a bi-racial teacher living in the South who has a restless nature. Helga was born to a black man and a Danish woman; her parents separated during her childhood, leaving her to be raised by her mother. Struggling to navigate within the stifled black culture of the south, Helga finds herself leaving her job and fiancé behind to start a new life in Chicago.

I really like Larsen’s descriptive and fluid writing style. She uses Helga’s character to portray the conflicted life of a bi-racial woman who attempts to live in both the black and white world. Larsen wrestles with wanting to portray Helga as sexually liberated without turning her into a sexually exploited woman via loss of social status, domination in marriage, or pregnancy—common devices inflicted on black women since slavery times.

If you want to read her novels, I would recommend purchasing the reprint by Rutgers University Press, which combines Quicksand and Passing. The introduction highlights Larsen’s life and dissects the complexity of black women’s sexual identity (from slavery to the Harlem Renaissance) and how female authors grappled with these stereotypes in their literature.