The Complete Frances Harper (2021) is a collection of writing by
Frances Ellen Watkins Harper. Harper, the first African American
woman to publish a novel, gained a reputation as a popular poet and
impassioned abolitionist in the decades leading up to the American
Civil War. Much of her work was rediscovered in the twentieth
century and preserved for its significance to some of the leading
social movements of the nineteenth century, including temperance,
abolition, and women's suffrage. As an artist for whom the personal
was always political, Frances Harper served in a leadership role at
the Women's Christian Temperance Union and worked to establish the
National Association of Colored Women, serving for a time as vice
president of the organization. Included in this volume are her
early poetry volumes, such as Forest Leaves (1845) and Poems on
Miscellaneous Subjects (1854). In "Bury Me in Free Land," an
influential poem published in an 1858 edition of abolitionist
newspaper The Anti-Slavery Bugle, Harper expresses her commitment
to the cause of freedom in life or death terms: "I ask no monument,
proud and high, / To arrest the gaze of the passers-by; / All that
my yearning spirit craves, / Is bury me not in a land of slaves."
She reflects on the theme of freedom throughout her body of work,
often examining her own identity or experiences as a free Black
woman alongside the lives of her enslaved countrymen. The Complete
Frances Harper also includes her four groundbreaking novels.
Minnie's Sacrifice (1869), originally serialized in the Christian
Recorder, addresses such themes as miscegenation, passing, and the
institutionalized rape of enslaved women using the story of Moses
as inspiration. Sowing and Reaping (1876) is a novel concerned with
the cause of temperance in a time when Black families were
frequently torn apart by alcoholism. Trial and Triumph (1888-1889)
is a politically conscious novel concerned with an African American
community doing its best to overcome hardship with love and
solidarity. Iola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted (1892) is a story of
liberation set during the American Civil War that deals with such
themes as abolition, miscegenation, and passing. In these novels,
poems, speeches from across her lengthy career as an artist and
activist, Harper not only dedicates herself to her suffering
people, but imagines a time "When men of diverse sects and creeds /
Are clasping hand in hand." With a beautifully designed cover and
professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of The Complete
Frances Harper is a classic of African American literature
reimagined for modern readers.
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