LibGuides: African American Women Writers: Nella Larsen

Nella Larsen (1893-1964) Danish-African-American novelist, was born on 13 April 1891 in Chicago, Illinois. Larsen herself later claimed that she was born in 1893. Her mother, Mary Hanson Walker, was Danish whilst her father, Peter Walker, was either West Indian or African-American. Details of Larsen's life are both scant and misleading. Larsen herself wrote that her father died when she was two years old, adding, with characteristic reticence (and in the third person) that 'shortly afterward her mother married a man of her own race and nationality'. Other sources say that Larsen's parents separated shortly after her birth. Whatever the case, her mother married Peter Larsen who was presumably also Danish, and Nella Larsen took her surname from her stepfather. Part of Larsen's reticence, it has been argued, is due to her being the only black member of her immediate family. The critic Elizabeth Brown-Guillory claims that Larsen's stepfather 'viewed her as an embarrassment', and Larsen appears to have felt a keen sense of alienation from her immediate family, including both her mother and her half-sister. Thadious M. Davis in his book Nella Larsen: Novelist of the Harlem Renaissance: A Woman's Life Unveiled (1994) examines Larsen's guardedness about her life, and speculates as to whether Walker and Larsen might have been the same person.

Genre: Literary fiction; Psychological fiction

More about Nella Larsen at ProQuest One Literature

By Nella Larsen

The Complete Fiction of Nella Larsen: Passing, Quicksand, and the Stories by Nella Larsen
This volume brings together the complete fiction of the author of Passing and Quicksand, one of the most gifted writers of the Harlem Renaissance. Throughout her short but brilliant literary career, Nella Larsen wrote piercing dramas about the black middle class that featured sensitive, spirited heroines struggling to find a place where they belonged. Passing, Larsen's best-known work, is a disturbing story about the unraveling lives of two childhood friends, one of whom turns her back on her past and marries a white bigot. Just as disquieting is the portrait in Quicksand of Helga Crane, half black and half white, who is unable to escape her loneliness no matter where and with whom she lives. Race and marriage offer few securities here or in the other stories in this compulsively readable collection, rich in psychological complexity and imbued with a sense of place that brings Harlem vibrantly to life.
Passing by Nella Larsen
The beautiful, elegant, and ambitious Clare Kendry leads a dangerous life. A light-skinned African American married to a white man unaware of her racial heritage, Clare has severed all ties to her past to become part of white, middle-class society. Clare's childhood friend, Irene Redfield, as light-skinned as Clare, has chosen to remain within the African American community. Married to a successful doctor and the mother of two boys, Irene refuses to acknowledge the racism she grew up with and that continues to set limits on 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.
Quicksand by Nella Larsen
Helga's mother is white, and her father is black -- and absent. Ostracized throughout her lonely childhood for her dark skin, Helga spends her adult life seeking acceptance. Everywhere she goes -- the American South, Harlem, even Denmark--she feels oppressed. Socially, economically, and psychologically, Helga struggles against the "quicksand" of classism, racism, and sexism. One of the most acclaimed and influential writers of the Harlem Renaissance, Nella Larsen published her powerful first novel in 1928. Quicksand features intriguing autobiographical parallels with Larsen's own life, in addition to reflecting many aspects of African-American culture of the 1920s. Alice Walker praised it and Passing (Larsen's second novel, also available in a Dover edition) as "novels I will never forget. They open up a whole world of experience and struggle that seemed to me, when I first read them years ago, absolutely absorbing, fascinating, and indispensable."

About Nella Larsen

In Search of Nella Larsen: a biography of the color line by George Hutchinson
Born to a Danish seamstress and a black West Indian cook, Nella Larsen lived her life in the shadows of America's racial divide. Her writings about that life, briefly celebrated in her time, were lost to later generations--only to be rediscovered and hailed by many. In his search for Nella Larsen, George Hutchinson exposes the truths and half-truths surrounding her, 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.
Nella Larsen, Novelist of the Harlem Renaissance by Thadious M. Davis
Nella Larsen is recognized as one of the most influential, and certainly one of the most enigmatic, writers of the Harlem Renaissance. With the instant success of her two novels, Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929), she became a bright light in New York's literary firmament. But her meteoric rise was followed by a surprising fall: In 1930 she was accused of plagiarizing a short story, and after 1933 she disappeared from both the literary and African-American worlds of New York. She lived the rest of her life--more than three decades--out of the public eye, working primarily as a nurse. In a remarkable achievement, Thadious Davis has penetrated the fog of mystery that has surrounded Larsen to present a detailed and fascinating account of the life and work of this gifted, determined, yet vulnerable artist. In addition to unraveling the details of Larsen's personal life, Davis deftly situates the writer within the broader politics and aesthetics of the Harlem Renaissance and analyzes her life and work in terms of the current literature on race and gender.
Women of the Harlem Renaissance by Cheryl A. Wall
Features chapters on Jessie Redmon Fauset, Zora Neale Hurston and Nella Larsen. Also discusses other artists including Josephine Baker, Gwendolyn Bennett, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Charlotte Mason, Bessie Smith, Anne Spencer, and Jean Toomer.