Frances Ellen Watkins Harper

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (b. 24 September 1825–d. 22 February 1911) is one of the most studied African American women writers in print scholarship. Her first published short story “The Two Offers” and her masterpiece Iola Leroy were for nearly a century the most widely known fictions by a 19th-century black woman. Nevertheless, critical attention to Harper remains grossly limited, especially in comparison to such canonical 19th-century US male authors as Herman Melville. The dearth of Harper scholarship ensues partly from a lack of autobiographical detail within her extant writings. Moreover, some of her professional papers were destroyed in a fire in the offices of the Philadelphia printers of Ferguson and Company. That noted, critics have situated Harper amid both 19th-century sentimentalist and realist writers. Scholarship devoted to Harper has accumulated since black arts–era critics Filler, Hill, and Robinson and black feminist critics Christian, Foster, and M. H. Washington studiously recovered Harper’s writings, staking out places for them within various (African) American literary traditions. Also, even before Graham called for “immediate and critical attention” to Harper’s works (Harper 1988, p. xxxvi, cited under Anthologies), Sherman and Ammons began recentering Harper in US poetry and women’s studies. Raised by her uncle, William Watkins, Harper worked as a teenage domestic for a Baltimore bookseller named Armstrong before becoming the first female faculty member (teaching sewing) at the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Union Seminary near Columbus, Ohio, in 1850. Harper’s work in the Armstrong bookstore and home provided her with access to the family’s library and determined her long literary career. She published at least ten volumes of poetry between 1846 and 1891, three serialized novels, magazine fiction especially notable for its racially ambiguous characters, and the novel Iola Leroy. She earned her living as an acclaimed writer and lecturer, educator, antislavery and temperance activist, orator, suffragist, and leader in various black and women’s rights organizations and Christian institutions. Across the 19th century, thousands of Americans heard or read her speeches decrying gender, race, and class inequities; her published works appeared in every major independent black publication of her long life and in numerous white venues as well. Hers was a fiercely moral rhetoric, often balanced with political or folk wit. Throughout her life, Harper suffered periodic illness; images of sickness and death recur in her work. Harper’s writings alternately critique injustice and exuberantly celebrate abolition, emancipation, and the promises of civil liberties for all.