![]() ![]() She showed promise as a writer from her early years, and she is said to have published a volume of poems, Forest Leaves, by 1845, although no copy now exists. Her mother died when she was three, and Frances was raised by her aunt and educated in her uncle's school in Baltimore. LIFE AND CAREERįrances Ellen Watkins was born in Maryland in 1825, the daughter of a woman who was a freed slave her father was most likely white, although records of her early life are quite sketchy. Her reworking and rebuttal of the "tragic mulatto" theme in African American literature was a conscious political move for her own time but also has important ramifications for the history of the African American novel. Iola Leroy focuses on black identity, a concept central to this historical period and to African American literature. Harper's best-known novel provides a black perspective on a half century of American nineteenth-century history and projects an optimism for the future that, sadly, was not borne out by subsequent events in the 1890s and the first part of the twentieth century. ![]() Iola Leroy, among the first novels by an African American woman, chronicles black experience during slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction. Harper's 1892 novel, Iola Leroy or, Shadows Uplifted, was in many ways the culmination of a remarkable career by an African American woman who was a poet, a novelist, and a noted speaker in the abolitionist, suffrage, and temperance movements. ![]()
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