The Complete Frances Harper

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.” This edition of The Complete Frances Harper is a classic of African American literature reimagined for modern readers.

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