Violets and Other Tales

On Easter evening, a woman hums beside a letter that explains every flower in a small bouquet—and why its sender has bound them with a lock of her hair. The violets are more than a token: they carry a message meant to outlast the night.

Alice Moore Dunbar-Nelson’s late-nineteenth-century collection moves from intimate scenes of love and remembrance to poems and sketches about work, art, mercy, and women’s independence. In “Violets,” an Easter gift ties two lovers to memories both tender and perilous; elsewhere, a lively club debate asks whether a woman who earns her own living has any reason to marry. Across its shifting moods, feeling meets questions of freedom and what people owe one another. What will endure when love, custom, and independence pull in different directions?

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