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An Intimation of Things Distant: The Collected Fiction of Nella Larsen
Two novels and three short stories by "the mystery woman" of the Harlem Renaissance along with an incisive introduction by Charles R. Larson and a foreword by novelist Marita Golden. A unique and important anthology.
279 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1928
About the author
Nella Larsen
24 books592 followersNellallitea 'Nella' Larsen (first called Nellie Walker) was an American novelist of the Harlem Renaissance who wrote two novels and a few short stories. Though her literary output was scant, what she wrote earned her recognition by her contemporaries and by present-day critics.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 158 reviews
December 6, 2021
Woop woop! Just finished my first book for Black History Month (even though, technically, five full works are included in this bind-up edition). I'm so happy that I made Nella Larsen my author of choice for this very special month.
Nella (1891 – 1964) was an American novelist of the Harlem Renaissance. Working as a nurse and a librarian, she published two novels, Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929), and a few short stories. Though her literary output was scant, she earned recognition by her contemporaries. A revival of interest in her writing has occurred since the late 20th century, when issues of racial and sexual identity have been studied.
Quicksand was out of print from the 1930s to the 1970s. It is a work that explores both cross-cultural and interracial themes. The novel functions as a semi-autobiographical novel as there are direct ties between Nella Larsen's life and the life of the fictional Helga Crane. Like Larsen, Helga is of mixed racial background, functioning as a psychological problem due to her failure to create a sense of self that fits into the community. She finds this process alienating, her only comfortable identity is as an outsider. Due to this, Helga Crane produces a peculiar relationship with happiness in which she doesn't know what it is, but she knows she doesn't have it.
Set primarily in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City in the 1920s, Passing centers on the reunion of two childhood friends—Clare Kendry and Irene Redfield—and their increasing fascination with each other's lives. The title refers to the practice of racial "passing", and is a key element of the novel; Clare Kendry's attempt to pass as white for her husband, John Bellew, is its most significant depiction in the novel, and a catalyst for the tragic events.
The Wrong Man and Freedom appeared in 1926 in Young's Magazine. Under the surface narrative, both short stories tell us that marriage is often a precarious balancing act, especially when spouses have not been honest with each other and have concealed aspects of their former selves. Both stories are free of any racial commentary—no doubt because of the magazine in which they appeared.
Sanctuary was published in Forum in January 1930. The power of Larsen's story is undeniable. Race is the strongest tie that binds people together. Even though Jim killed her son, Annie will protect him because he is black. Nowhere else in her published work had Nella Larsen made such an emphatic statement about blackness. The story is terse, direct—totally convincing in its use of dialect.
All in all, my heart is full after reading Larsen's complete work and learning a bit more about her personal life and the Harlem Renaissance as a whole. It's so tragic that false charges that her story, Sanctuary, had been plagiarized basically destroyed her literary career. She completed three other novels in her lifetime but all of them got rejected. Unfortunately, those stories are lost to us forever.
Nella Larsen is definitely undervalued. She deserves more love and attention which is why I can't wait to review all of her work on my channel.
Nella (1891 – 1964) was an American novelist of the Harlem Renaissance. Working as a nurse and a librarian, she published two novels, Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929), and a few short stories. Though her literary output was scant, she earned recognition by her contemporaries. A revival of interest in her writing has occurred since the late 20th century, when issues of racial and sexual identity have been studied.
Quicksand was out of print from the 1930s to the 1970s. It is a work that explores both cross-cultural and interracial themes. The novel functions as a semi-autobiographical novel as there are direct ties between Nella Larsen's life and the life of the fictional Helga Crane. Like Larsen, Helga is of mixed racial background, functioning as a psychological problem due to her failure to create a sense of self that fits into the community. She finds this process alienating, her only comfortable identity is as an outsider. Due to this, Helga Crane produces a peculiar relationship with happiness in which she doesn't know what it is, but she knows she doesn't have it.
Set primarily in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City in the 1920s, Passing centers on the reunion of two childhood friends—Clare Kendry and Irene Redfield—and their increasing fascination with each other's lives. The title refers to the practice of racial "passing", and is a key element of the novel; Clare Kendry's attempt to pass as white for her husband, John Bellew, is its most significant depiction in the novel, and a catalyst for the tragic events.
The Wrong Man and Freedom appeared in 1926 in Young's Magazine. Under the surface narrative, both short stories tell us that marriage is often a precarious balancing act, especially when spouses have not been honest with each other and have concealed aspects of their former selves. Both stories are free of any racial commentary—no doubt because of the magazine in which they appeared.
Sanctuary was published in Forum in January 1930. The power of Larsen's story is undeniable. Race is the strongest tie that binds people together. Even though Jim killed her son, Annie will protect him because he is black. Nowhere else in her published work had Nella Larsen made such an emphatic statement about blackness. The story is terse, direct—totally convincing in its use of dialect.
All in all, my heart is full after reading Larsen's complete work and learning a bit more about her personal life and the Harlem Renaissance as a whole. It's so tragic that false charges that her story, Sanctuary, had been plagiarized basically destroyed her literary career. She completed three other novels in her lifetime but all of them got rejected. Unfortunately, those stories are lost to us forever.
Nella Larsen is definitely undervalued. She deserves more love and attention which is why I can't wait to review all of her work on my channel.
August 24, 2017
I read this book because I'm interested in the literature of "Passing" and was curious about Nella Larsen's short novel with that title. Passing is very good (though the ending seems implausible) but her novel Quicksand is even better. Why hadn't I known of this important African American woman writer before? I'd have taught her in Women's Literature courses and will do so in the future... very modern in her outlook on women's lives, particularly in her writing about an intelligent modern woman of color.
December 28, 2018
I can't think how I discovered Nella Larssen. It's always through some other author. At any rate I got her book, Passing, and was enthralled by it. So I got the rest of her books. They are equally fascinating.
I have always been interested in the subject of race, what constitutes race, what qualifies someone as belonging to a certain race.
This is especially true in the history of my country, the United States. Slavery produced a lot of mixed race people, thanks to the abuse of plantation owners, considering the female slave population as their personal harem. After a generation or two an entirely new race arrived, which was neither black nor white, but both. Many slaves were as white, if not whiter, than the plantation owners.
Other authors have dealt with this subject. Mark Twain does in his hilarious parody, Puddin' Head Wilson. Kate Chopin wrote a haunting short story about the same subject, which should be required reading of anyone who is interested in the, history and social structure and of New Orleans before the Civil War.
Charles W. Chestnut and Jean Toomer were two authors of mixed race who looked white but identified as black. Their stories often deal with the subject of racial identity.
Nella Larsen's father a biracial man from the West Indies, who quite possibly never identified as black, and her mother was a Danish immigrant. Her father disappeared early in her life and her mother married again, this time a fellow Dane, and Nella adopted his last name of "Larsen".
I have already reviewed the story "Passing" elsewhere, so I will concentrate on the rest of Larsen's ouvre in this review. It is sadly a small body of work. I wish there was much more.
In this collection there are three short stories, each conclude with a O'Henry-esque twist. These brief tales hold the reader in suspense and pack a tight punch at the very end.
Quicksand is considered to be autobiographical. It is about Helga Crane, a pretty young woman with a Danish mother and West Indian father. Her father deserts the family and Crane and her mother live in social isolation because her American European relatives won't acknowledge her.
As an adult and her mother by now dead, Crane seeks to make sense of her identity, to find out where she belongs. Rejected by the white population, she works first in a school for black people in the South.
She hates this job because she feels the black community is backwards and unimaginative. They don't celebrate life, they endure it. She holds them in contempt and herself above them as she views herself as superior in culture and intellect.
She quits in the middle of the year and returns to Chicago looking for work, which she finally receives as the personal companion to a woman who travels and gives speeches about the race problem. This woman finds Helga a job in Harlem and a young, pretty and wealthy black widow invites her to live with her as a companion.
Through this woman Helga is introduced to progressive and liberal black and white people. At first she feels a sense of belonging, but their incessant tirade against the "racial problem" and their blatant and fierce hatred of white people, whom they blame for every single ill of the black race, grows repetitive and monotonous. Especially since this woman and her friends are all well off and would not deign to interact with the lower black classes they profess to advocate for.
Helga cannot fight against a growing sense of isolation and separation from a group of people she has come to find boorish. Again she is filled with contempt as she concludes that, while their lives are exciting, filled with social occasions and fashionable clothes and houses, they are empty on the inside. Helga comes to hate them just as she hated the poor black community in the South.
She receives a letter from her mother's family in Denmark. They want her to come live with them, so Helga takes a ship to Scandinavia. Here she is met warmly by a white group of people who treat her dramatically different than her white family back in Chicago. At first she has to get over being the only black person and eventually she does as the people in town grow used to seeing someone who looks different from them.
Her Danish family is wealthy and they take care to dress her expensively and take her to the best parties and balls and social occasions. They hope to make her an advantageous match with one of their friends.
But Helga cannot immerse herself in the culture. She does not fit in. Her family tells her she is being ridiculous. She simply cannot overcome her emotional detachment from those around her, even though they love her. A young Danish man proposes marriage to her but she is against interracial marriage. Her family asks her who she plans to marry, then? Why is she so stubborn and unreasonable? Again her contempt and hatred for others overwhelms her and she wants to leave.
Finally Helga returns to America to attend the wedding of her friend in Harlem. But when she gets there she undergoes a queer religious experience where she believes she has finally found her place. She marries a preacher and returns down South with him.
Her life becomes one of a domestic housekeeper and mother of many children. Helga throws herself into this life trying to sustain her initial fever of religious experience.
But it doesn't last and she finally "wakes up" with horror to the kind of life she has condemned herself to. She wants to run away, but she feels obligated to stay with her children.
She finally concludes that there is no hope, no meaning, no escape from herself and she gives birth to her fifth child and there the story ends.
The story is a tragedy and not for the reasons some people have asserted. I have read that it was the "white supremacist" culture of America that ruined Helga's life. But Larsen is excruciatingly honest with self-examination. She shows it is herself that is alienated.
Many people are bi-racial; every single person regardless of race of economic level suffers tragedy. There is persecution everywhere. Everyone can choose to allow their circumstances to defeat them, or to rise above them and conquer.
Nella Larsen was a crucial and integral part of the Harlem Renaissance, but she quit writing and died in obscurity. I'm afraid her own stubborn myopic view of life is what eventually defeated her.
I have always been interested in the subject of race, what constitutes race, what qualifies someone as belonging to a certain race.
This is especially true in the history of my country, the United States. Slavery produced a lot of mixed race people, thanks to the abuse of plantation owners, considering the female slave population as their personal harem. After a generation or two an entirely new race arrived, which was neither black nor white, but both. Many slaves were as white, if not whiter, than the plantation owners.
Other authors have dealt with this subject. Mark Twain does in his hilarious parody, Puddin' Head Wilson. Kate Chopin wrote a haunting short story about the same subject, which should be required reading of anyone who is interested in the, history and social structure and of New Orleans before the Civil War.
Charles W. Chestnut and Jean Toomer were two authors of mixed race who looked white but identified as black. Their stories often deal with the subject of racial identity.
Nella Larsen's father a biracial man from the West Indies, who quite possibly never identified as black, and her mother was a Danish immigrant. Her father disappeared early in her life and her mother married again, this time a fellow Dane, and Nella adopted his last name of "Larsen".
I have already reviewed the story "Passing" elsewhere, so I will concentrate on the rest of Larsen's ouvre in this review. It is sadly a small body of work. I wish there was much more.
In this collection there are three short stories, each conclude with a O'Henry-esque twist. These brief tales hold the reader in suspense and pack a tight punch at the very end.
Quicksand is considered to be autobiographical. It is about Helga Crane, a pretty young woman with a Danish mother and West Indian father. Her father deserts the family and Crane and her mother live in social isolation because her American European relatives won't acknowledge her.
As an adult and her mother by now dead, Crane seeks to make sense of her identity, to find out where she belongs. Rejected by the white population, she works first in a school for black people in the South.
She hates this job because she feels the black community is backwards and unimaginative. They don't celebrate life, they endure it. She holds them in contempt and herself above them as she views herself as superior in culture and intellect.
She quits in the middle of the year and returns to Chicago looking for work, which she finally receives as the personal companion to a woman who travels and gives speeches about the race problem. This woman finds Helga a job in Harlem and a young, pretty and wealthy black widow invites her to live with her as a companion.
Through this woman Helga is introduced to progressive and liberal black and white people. At first she feels a sense of belonging, but their incessant tirade against the "racial problem" and their blatant and fierce hatred of white people, whom they blame for every single ill of the black race, grows repetitive and monotonous. Especially since this woman and her friends are all well off and would not deign to interact with the lower black classes they profess to advocate for.
Helga cannot fight against a growing sense of isolation and separation from a group of people she has come to find boorish. Again she is filled with contempt as she concludes that, while their lives are exciting, filled with social occasions and fashionable clothes and houses, they are empty on the inside. Helga comes to hate them just as she hated the poor black community in the South.
She receives a letter from her mother's family in Denmark. They want her to come live with them, so Helga takes a ship to Scandinavia. Here she is met warmly by a white group of people who treat her dramatically different than her white family back in Chicago. At first she has to get over being the only black person and eventually she does as the people in town grow used to seeing someone who looks different from them.
Her Danish family is wealthy and they take care to dress her expensively and take her to the best parties and balls and social occasions. They hope to make her an advantageous match with one of their friends.
But Helga cannot immerse herself in the culture. She does not fit in. Her family tells her she is being ridiculous. She simply cannot overcome her emotional detachment from those around her, even though they love her. A young Danish man proposes marriage to her but she is against interracial marriage. Her family asks her who she plans to marry, then? Why is she so stubborn and unreasonable? Again her contempt and hatred for others overwhelms her and she wants to leave.
Finally Helga returns to America to attend the wedding of her friend in Harlem. But when she gets there she undergoes a queer religious experience where she believes she has finally found her place. She marries a preacher and returns down South with him.
Her life becomes one of a domestic housekeeper and mother of many children. Helga throws herself into this life trying to sustain her initial fever of religious experience.
But it doesn't last and she finally "wakes up" with horror to the kind of life she has condemned herself to. She wants to run away, but she feels obligated to stay with her children.
She finally concludes that there is no hope, no meaning, no escape from herself and she gives birth to her fifth child and there the story ends.
The story is a tragedy and not for the reasons some people have asserted. I have read that it was the "white supremacist" culture of America that ruined Helga's life. But Larsen is excruciatingly honest with self-examination. She shows it is herself that is alienated.
Many people are bi-racial; every single person regardless of race of economic level suffers tragedy. There is persecution everywhere. Everyone can choose to allow their circumstances to defeat them, or to rise above them and conquer.
Nella Larsen was a crucial and integral part of the Harlem Renaissance, but she quit writing and died in obscurity. I'm afraid her own stubborn myopic view of life is what eventually defeated her.
July 16, 2017
The short stories: 3/5
Quicksand: 5/5
Passing: 4/5
Total: 4.5/5
Quicksand: 5/5
Passing: 4/5
Total: 4.5/5
She hated white people with a deep and burning hatred, with the kind of hatred which, finding itself held in sufficiently numerous groups, was capable someday, on some great provocation, of bursting into dangerously malignant flames.As much as things have changed and as much new material I've been exposed to, my ratings for Larsen's works have not. I'd follow this up with a common "for good or for ill", but considering the track record I've been having with revisiting authors who have penned favorites, I'm going to stay content with the good. Much as Larsen specializes in the pithy, I found each of her short stories a bit too short, the minute twitches of her razor sharp analysis of emotions compacted a side too much into the realm of melodrama to make for quality engagement. Her novels, though, give her incisive whip crack of a wit and writing style enough room to fly to endings which, if unhappy, are all too realistic, and soaked to the gills with a world that the US has not, for all its efforts to deny such, moved past.
But she aped their clothes, their manners, and their gracious ways of living.
[N]o matter what the intensity of his feelings or desires might be, he was not the sort of man who would for any reason give up one particle of his own good opinion of himself.It's not actually a good thing for a classic to still be relevant due to its particular descriptions of institutionalized pain and oppression. This gives the group that has been dishing out such an excuse to render its view of the constructed Other myopic, as evidenced by the plethora of slave narratives receiving adulation in the film awards and other such trumpeted evaluation systems. The creative mind is free, but if the only images of certain groups that are raised to the easily accessible realm of public perception are those consigning them to hell on earth, it renders fiction just another tool of the hegemonic armory. It's a good thing, then, that Larsen has the skill to take on not only antiblackness, but the associated misogynoir and trope of the tragic mulatto in a fashion that, while focused on heroines forced to face monsters they never should have faced, redirects and deconstructs every threat faced, physical and non. This is the difference between fiction and solidification: the first takes life and gives it the means to set itself free, while the second slops together a various selection of dehumanizations and slews it out for the sake of status-quo reinforcing entertainment and the next injection of capitalism's carrot.
In that second she saw that she could bear anything, but only if no one knew that she had anything to bear.After a reread, I can see why Passing is clinically superior: it is less erratic, more believable, and shapes itself around the more volatile segments of Quicksand rather than centering itself through it. However, as unbelievably as Helen Crane hurls herself through life, the leaps of faith she makes again and again are much closer to my heart and my own experiences than the tenacious grip Irene Redfield keeps on her domestic stability, and so the more self-contained and plot arc-conforming pass me by by a smidgen. One thing Passing has in it that Quicksand doesn't have is intimations at bisexuality, and while the Wiki goes straight for lesbianism, the most Irene does is find both men (yes, even her husband/so called beard) and women extremely attractive, so monosexuals are just going to have to chill. I'll also admit that Passing has the better ending.
Here were no tatters and rags, no beggars. But, then, begging, she learned, was an offense punishable by law.I look forward to future rereads.
July 11, 2021
My moderate admiration for Nella Larsen's novella Passing proved to be rather fleeting. Because it was accompanied by her other published fiction (three short stories and a second novella, Quicksand), I chose to read those selections afterward.
The first thing that struck me was how heavily Larsen borrowed from The Wrong Man and (to a lesser extent) Freedom to create Passing. There's nothing wrong with that, and many authors make a habit of revisiting their earlier writings. However, with only five works to her credit, it did make for a reduction in variety.
The second, more disappointing, discovery was what I learned after reading the following phrase in the short Chronology that is printed at the end of this volume: "1930 Accused of plagiarism". My initial assumption was that a light-skinned Black woman had gained notoriety because of her talent and then been falsely accused in order to undermine her success. I wish that assumption had been correct.
Sadly, Nella Larsen did not just borrow from herself. Quicksand was a faithful recrafting of a short story published by Sheila Kaye-Smith eight years earlier. And the opening (at least) of Sanctuary is a similarly modified rendering of a passage originally written by John Galsworthy in his short story The First and Last.
With that in mind, I'm still of the opinion that Passing is very good. I'm just not sure how much of it is attributable to Larsen and how much was from uncredited sources.
3.5 stars
The first thing that struck me was how heavily Larsen borrowed from The Wrong Man and (to a lesser extent) Freedom to create Passing. There's nothing wrong with that, and many authors make a habit of revisiting their earlier writings. However, with only five works to her credit, it did make for a reduction in variety.
The second, more disappointing, discovery was what I learned after reading the following phrase in the short Chronology that is printed at the end of this volume: "1930 Accused of plagiarism". My initial assumption was that a light-skinned Black woman had gained notoriety because of her talent and then been falsely accused in order to undermine her success. I wish that assumption had been correct.
Sadly, Nella Larsen did not just borrow from herself. Quicksand was a faithful recrafting of a short story published by Sheila Kaye-Smith eight years earlier. And the opening (at least) of Sanctuary is a similarly modified rendering of a passage originally written by John Galsworthy in his short story The First and Last.
With that in mind, I'm still of the opinion that Passing is very good. I'm just not sure how much of it is attributable to Larsen and how much was from uncredited sources.
3.5 stars
February 20, 2022
A few weeks after seeing the movie Passing on Netflix, which I enjoyed but without giving a thought to the origin of the story, I happened upon a reference somewhere about the author of the novel on which it was based, a book published in 1929, written by a relatively obscure biracial writer named Nella Larsen. Larsen, who also had a very successful long-term career as a nurse, had a brief career as an author before it was cut short by a scandal in 1930. I resolved to seek out the novel and found it as part of An Intimation of Things Distant: The Collected Fiction of Nella Larsen. The “collected fiction,” sadly, consists of only three short stores and two novellas, one of which is Passing.
I have recently been watching, coincidentally, Jazz, a PBS music history series by Ken Burns, the early parts of which touched on the Harlem Renaissance of in the 1920s and ‘30s (fascinating, BTW!). These episodes include insights into the attitudes of many comfortable middle-class blacks toward the rest of the African- American community who were then enjoying a vivacious popular culture that included the new musical form jazz, which was considered to be, in certain circles, rather vulgar and unrefined. These episodes of Jazz gave a wonderful and enriching context to Passing and the other novella in this volume, Quicksand.
Both novels have at their centers mixed-race women who are ambivalent about their origins and native community and exhibit a restlessness and sense of conflict that upend their lives. While they want to reject their black identity for the oppression and degradation it represents for blacks in American, especially in the era of Jim Crow, they find it is not so simple to escape the comfort and familiarity of their shared heritage and their community.
The three short stories are also good. The first two each has a bit of a twist. The third, “Sanctuary” resulted in accusations of plagiarism that curtailed Larsen’s writing career, although it appears that it was never clearly proven that its similarity to someone else’s story was intentional.
From the foreword by writer Marita Golden: “The political and social debates of the period, the texture of the Harlem Renaissance, the specific fabric of Negro life, be it urban or rural, are captured with a eye for detail that is early surgical. While always delicate and often poetic, Larsen is tough-minded and withering in her critique of black bourgeois manners and obsessions.”
It’s unfortunate that Larsen unable to publish more of her work. Her storytelling skills and prose style are very good and I appreciate her characters’ internal monologues that allow the reader to intimately to follow their conflicts and mental state. “Show, don’t tell” has never been an absolute with me. When handled skillfully, an internal rumination, along with appropriate action, can reveal much about a character’s world and illuminate a reality quite foreign to mine, always a good reason to read.
I have recently been watching, coincidentally, Jazz, a PBS music history series by Ken Burns, the early parts of which touched on the Harlem Renaissance of in the 1920s and ‘30s (fascinating, BTW!). These episodes include insights into the attitudes of many comfortable middle-class blacks toward the rest of the African- American community who were then enjoying a vivacious popular culture that included the new musical form jazz, which was considered to be, in certain circles, rather vulgar and unrefined. These episodes of Jazz gave a wonderful and enriching context to Passing and the other novella in this volume, Quicksand.
Both novels have at their centers mixed-race women who are ambivalent about their origins and native community and exhibit a restlessness and sense of conflict that upend their lives. While they want to reject their black identity for the oppression and degradation it represents for blacks in American, especially in the era of Jim Crow, they find it is not so simple to escape the comfort and familiarity of their shared heritage and their community.
The three short stories are also good. The first two each has a bit of a twist. The third, “Sanctuary” resulted in accusations of plagiarism that curtailed Larsen’s writing career, although it appears that it was never clearly proven that its similarity to someone else’s story was intentional.
From the foreword by writer Marita Golden: “The political and social debates of the period, the texture of the Harlem Renaissance, the specific fabric of Negro life, be it urban or rural, are captured with a eye for detail that is early surgical. While always delicate and often poetic, Larsen is tough-minded and withering in her critique of black bourgeois manners and obsessions.”
It’s unfortunate that Larsen unable to publish more of her work. Her storytelling skills and prose style are very good and I appreciate her characters’ internal monologues that allow the reader to intimately to follow their conflicts and mental state. “Show, don’t tell” has never been an absolute with me. When handled skillfully, an internal rumination, along with appropriate action, can reveal much about a character’s world and illuminate a reality quite foreign to mine, always a good reason to read.
Read
November 20, 2010Although this slim volume actually represents Harlem Renaissance writer Nella Larsen's entire written output, for my money her 1929 novella Passing so far eclipses any of its other contents, that I might almost suggest starting the book on page 163, reading to the end, and only re-starting from the beginning if you fall in love with what you find. I'll therefore be focusing today on Passing, with only a brief note to explain my preference: in her 1928 Quicksand, and even more in the short stories that precede it, I was underwhelmed by Larsen's compulsion to "tell" rather than "show"; in fact she spends so much time over-explaining her main character's mental states that she has scarcely any opportunity to demonstrate them through actions or circumstances. While the result would probably still be of interest to a diaspora studies major (the protagonist of Quicksand, Helga Crane, is a chronically restless woman of mixed race attempting to find her place in the world), it struck me as basically a bundle of theoretical circumstances, with no real evocation of place or character. Add to that a "cold," not-particularly-supple prose style, and I was surprised to have read about Larsen's increasing prominence in the canon over the past few years—unless Quicksand is to be read purely as a logic-based essay on mixed-race socialization.
Passing, however, changed my opinion of Larsen's capabilities, and made me regret her 1930 abandonment of writing for nursing, since I would love to see where her trajectory would have taken her otherwise. While Larsen's preoccupation with her protagonist's psychology is still on display here, it is complemented by vivid depictions of late 1920s Harlem and its upper-middle-class black culture. Her prose is more limber, more versatile, and creates sinister undercurrents running among her characters. With this kind of backdrop, Larsen's trademark insights into the liminal spaces between white and black (and possibly between same-sex and opposite-sex attraction) are much more engaging, since they seem to pertain to actual humans rather than to bundles of explication only.
Plot-wise, Passing centers around the relationship between two old school friends, Irene Redfield and Clare Kindry, who meet again by chance on hot summer day after many years apart. Irene, from whose perspective we get our limited-third-person narration, is an upstanding member of the middle-class Negro set, the kind of woman who organizes luncheons and charity balls. As such she feels scandalized by the knowledge, picked up here and there via vague rumors, that blond, charismatic Clare has crossed the color line, married a white man, and is passing herself off as white. Indeed, it soon transpires that Clare's situation is both more privileged and more precarious than Irene's own, and both women have conflicted feelings about the choices they have made. Although Irene spends much of her time feeling offended by Clare, and repeatedly promises herself and her husband that she will cut all ties with her old friend, she allows an ongoing relationship to develop—this even after she has met Clare's shockingly racist husband, and despite her knowledge that by helping Clare to revisit Harlem she is putting them both in danger.
One of the interesting aspects of the novella is Irene's relationship with the idea of "passing." She herself is light-skinned, usually taken for someone of Italian or Spanish descent, and in the opening scene we actually see her passing for white herself by entering and allowing herself to be served at a segregated restaurant:
Despite her own willingness to slip through the color boundary now and then, however, Irene's morality is outraged by Clare's decision to turn her back on "her own kind," to live permanently with white people who believe that she is also white. Interestingly, many of Irene's objections seem to be similar to those a middle-class white woman might make: Clare ought to know her place, but instead she is grasping. Irene says several times that Clare always had a "having" disposition, that she was greedy, unsatisfiable. When Clare asks Irene if she's ever thought of "passing," Irene answers contemptuously "No, why would I?" (despite the fact that she IS passing at the very moment this conversation is going on), and continues "I have everything I want." Passing, then, in Irene's mind and also Clare's, equates to a way of "getting more," of obtaining illicit goods and status that would be unavailable to a black person. Irene takes Clare's decision as an insult, since it implies that what Irene "has" isn't good enough, but she also, at some level, understands the allure. She also definitely understands the allure of Clare herself; there is a strong current of physical attraction that overtakes her more logical resolutions every time she meets Clare in person. During their initial meeting Irene thinks to herself that Clare had
At first flush the above paragraph reads like so many pointless fawning descriptions of beautiful women, but in reality there's much more going on. As Irene contemplates Clare, she is more and more drawn in—that "tempting" mouth isn't just tempting in the abstract, but tempting to Irene specifically. It's worth noting, too, that as much as Clare's decision to pass for white legitimately offends Irene, it's the "exotic" mixture of white European and black African features in the other woman's face that she finds so irresistible. So too, Clare's "Negro" eyes are "mysterious and concealing"—mysterious even to Irene, who herself identifies as a Negro. In this association of Negro with mystery, we can see Irene's internalization of the dominant (i.e., white) messaging around racial identity. Even though she is herself black, and socializes primarily with black people, she still thinks of blacks as embodying "mystery" in a way whites do not. Later in the novel, she and a white novelist speculate about what draws white men and women to balls given by black people. Irene opines that it's merely "curiosity" about potential dancing partners of another race, but she herself is more curious about—and drawn to—the "mysterious" hidden blackness of Clare than about dancing with any white man.
In fact, if we consider Irene's association of exoticism, mystery and concealment with black people, and if we see her own bourgeois morality as inherited from white Christian society, Larsen could be read as implying that blond, passing Clare is somehow more of a Negro than black-haired, repressive Irene—or at least, that Irene is engaged in just as much artifice as her coveted friend.
I know that this review is almost over and I've hardly strayed outside the novella's opening scene, but this is a piece whose plot-based subtleties are best discovered for oneself. Suffice it to say that the anxieties and ambivalences on display in this scene continue to grind against each other in interesting and, ultimately, tragic ways as the novella progresses. A fascinating glimpse of the interactions of race and sexuality in early 20th century Harlem.
Passing, however, changed my opinion of Larsen's capabilities, and made me regret her 1930 abandonment of writing for nursing, since I would love to see where her trajectory would have taken her otherwise. While Larsen's preoccupation with her protagonist's psychology is still on display here, it is complemented by vivid depictions of late 1920s Harlem and its upper-middle-class black culture. Her prose is more limber, more versatile, and creates sinister undercurrents running among her characters. With this kind of backdrop, Larsen's trademark insights into the liminal spaces between white and black (and possibly between same-sex and opposite-sex attraction) are much more engaging, since they seem to pertain to actual humans rather than to bundles of explication only.
Plot-wise, Passing centers around the relationship between two old school friends, Irene Redfield and Clare Kindry, who meet again by chance on hot summer day after many years apart. Irene, from whose perspective we get our limited-third-person narration, is an upstanding member of the middle-class Negro set, the kind of woman who organizes luncheons and charity balls. As such she feels scandalized by the knowledge, picked up here and there via vague rumors, that blond, charismatic Clare has crossed the color line, married a white man, and is passing herself off as white. Indeed, it soon transpires that Clare's situation is both more privileged and more precarious than Irene's own, and both women have conflicted feelings about the choices they have made. Although Irene spends much of her time feeling offended by Clare, and repeatedly promises herself and her husband that she will cut all ties with her old friend, she allows an ongoing relationship to develop—this even after she has met Clare's shockingly racist husband, and despite her knowledge that by helping Clare to revisit Harlem she is putting them both in danger.
One of the interesting aspects of the novella is Irene's relationship with the idea of "passing." She herself is light-skinned, usually taken for someone of Italian or Spanish descent, and in the opening scene we actually see her passing for white herself by entering and allowing herself to be served at a segregated restaurant:
No, the woman sitting there staring at her couldn't possibly know. [...] Nevertheless, Irene felt, in turn, anger, scorn, and fear slide over her. It wasn't that she was ashamed of being a Negro, or even of having it declared. It was the idea of being ejected from any place, even in the polite and tactful way in which the Drayton would probably do it, that disturbed her.
Despite her own willingness to slip through the color boundary now and then, however, Irene's morality is outraged by Clare's decision to turn her back on "her own kind," to live permanently with white people who believe that she is also white. Interestingly, many of Irene's objections seem to be similar to those a middle-class white woman might make: Clare ought to know her place, but instead she is grasping. Irene says several times that Clare always had a "having" disposition, that she was greedy, unsatisfiable. When Clare asks Irene if she's ever thought of "passing," Irene answers contemptuously "No, why would I?" (despite the fact that she IS passing at the very moment this conversation is going on), and continues "I have everything I want." Passing, then, in Irene's mind and also Clare's, equates to a way of "getting more," of obtaining illicit goods and status that would be unavailable to a black person. Irene takes Clare's decision as an insult, since it implies that what Irene "has" isn't good enough, but she also, at some level, understands the allure. She also definitely understands the allure of Clare herself; there is a strong current of physical attraction that overtakes her more logical resolutions every time she meets Clare in person. During their initial meeting Irene thinks to herself that Clare had
always had that pale gold hair, which, unsheared still, was drawn loosely back from a broad brow, partly hidden by the small close hat. Her lips, painted a brilliant geranium red, were sweet and sensitive and a little obstinate. A tempting mouth. The face across the forehead and cheeks was a trifle too wide, but the ivory skin had a peculiar soft luster. And the eyes were magnificent! Dark, sometimes absolutely black, always luminous, and set in long, black lashes. Arresting eyes, slow and mesmeric, and with, for all their warmth, something withdrawn and secret about them.
Ah! Surely! They were Negro eyes! Mysterious and concealing. and set in that ivory face under that bright hair, there was about them something exotic.
At first flush the above paragraph reads like so many pointless fawning descriptions of beautiful women, but in reality there's much more going on. As Irene contemplates Clare, she is more and more drawn in—that "tempting" mouth isn't just tempting in the abstract, but tempting to Irene specifically. It's worth noting, too, that as much as Clare's decision to pass for white legitimately offends Irene, it's the "exotic" mixture of white European and black African features in the other woman's face that she finds so irresistible. So too, Clare's "Negro" eyes are "mysterious and concealing"—mysterious even to Irene, who herself identifies as a Negro. In this association of Negro with mystery, we can see Irene's internalization of the dominant (i.e., white) messaging around racial identity. Even though she is herself black, and socializes primarily with black people, she still thinks of blacks as embodying "mystery" in a way whites do not. Later in the novel, she and a white novelist speculate about what draws white men and women to balls given by black people. Irene opines that it's merely "curiosity" about potential dancing partners of another race, but she herself is more curious about—and drawn to—the "mysterious" hidden blackness of Clare than about dancing with any white man.
In fact, if we consider Irene's association of exoticism, mystery and concealment with black people, and if we see her own bourgeois morality as inherited from white Christian society, Larsen could be read as implying that blond, passing Clare is somehow more of a Negro than black-haired, repressive Irene—or at least, that Irene is engaged in just as much artifice as her coveted friend.
I know that this review is almost over and I've hardly strayed outside the novella's opening scene, but this is a piece whose plot-based subtleties are best discovered for oneself. Suffice it to say that the anxieties and ambivalences on display in this scene continue to grind against each other in interesting and, ultimately, tragic ways as the novella progresses. A fascinating glimpse of the interactions of race and sexuality in early 20th century Harlem.
September 13, 2015
The short stories are excellent despite their brevity.
Quicksand - https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
Passing - https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
Quicksand - https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
Passing - https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
December 6, 2018
A great short story collection from Larsen, she manages to capture in these tales the disillusionment and feeling of never truly belonging to those stuck between two worlds and never feeling at home in either. Whether it’s outright “Passing” or the constantly moving, trying vainly to find your place, while sinking further into the “Quicksand” of the race question, these strike home in a very personal way. You can feel the soul crushing pressure of not belonging because you’re not black enough to be black and not white enough be white, forever being in-between two extremes. The other short stories and snippets,I can only say they left me wishing she had written more and that more had survived, especially the way to short Wrong Man.
September 22, 2018
Everything Harlem Renaissance writer Nella Larsen published in her too-short writing life.
Book Review: The Complete Fiction of Nella Larsen amply demonstrates that Larsen (1891-1964) had a ridiculously and tragically short literary career, and it's worth looking at her life just to see why it was so brief. The biracial Larsen, a nurse and soon to become a librarian, married Elmer Imes (one of the few black physicists in America) in 1919, and they became part of the Harlem bourgeois and the Harlem Renaissance. She wrote two "commercial" stories under a pseudonym, published her first novel Quicksand (dedicated to her husband) in 1928, and followed it with the even more acclaimed Passing the next year. At that point she was one of the brightest stars of the Harlem Renaissance. The two novels were followed by a short story published in 1930, which led to charges of plagiarism. She never published again. Larsen traveled to Europe on a Guggenheim grant, writing a new novel Mirage (no manuscript has been found), returning in 1932. After learning of her husband's affair with a white woman the couple divorced in 1933. She acknowledged that "he broke my heart" and suffered from depression for several years. Mirage, concerned a woman who learns her husband is still in love with his first wife, and so she has an affair with a "cad." It was rejected by her publisher, as were her next two novels. At that point Larsen stopped writing. The Complete Fiction of Nella Larsen (2001, originally published in 1992) includes all that she published. Afterward, she retained her ex-husband's name, and later began a highly successful nursing career that lasted the rest of her life. She was always exceptional.
The first two stories Larsen published are competent and entertaining, but not earth shattering, not to the level of her novels. She called them her "hack writing," though I think the stories are better than that. Their greatest interest, however, may be for the purpose of re-examining them in light of Larsen's racial background and her unstable marriage. For example, one story concerns a woman who has risen from poverty to security, but fears that all could be lost in a moment. The other is about a man who abandons his mistress because of some "depravity" in her character. "The Wrong Man" and "Freedom," both published in 1926 under a pseudonym (the too-clever "Allen Semi"), are solid, though average (the writing is fine) at best, say nothing overtly about race, are ostensibly about white people, and both depend on an inartful surprise ending. Neither story seems to be from the Nella Larsen we know and love. The third story, "Sanctuary," was published in January 1930. It was soon recognized as plagiarized from "Mrs. Adis" (1922) by Sheila Kaye-Smith, which was set in England. Although the duplication is undeniable (the similarities are described as "striking," "telling," and "embarrassing"), Larsen refashioned "Mrs. Adis" to her own purposes. The story was about working-class American blacks, rather than the bourgeois blacks she wrote about in her novels and other stories. Her version also, atypically, included dialect (as did the original), but more significantly, the key plot twist depends on race loyalty, rather than simple friendship as in Kaye-Smith's story. Despite the poaching, I think Larsen's story is the more powerful. It's a shame that she didn't realize what she'd done or didn't do more to distinguish "Sanctuary," as it's a valuable addition to her work. I believe Larsen simply and deliberately retold the story in a new and more dramatic setting, but for some reason felt she couldn't acknowledge that. Quicksand, her first novel, told the story of a biracial woman seeking her identity, but unable to survive in either the black or white worlds. Our protagonist, Helga Crane, can be bold, daring, but also self destructive (as Larsen described it, the "sorry tale of a girl who got what she wanted"). She needs to, but can't escape from the expectations others place on her, living in a world that harshly enforces the rules of the color line (and sexuality), and denies a place for someone who doesn't fit as either black or white. The ending is despairing and claustrophobic. Apart from its notable social significance, Quicksand is a work of substantial literary merit, more complex then similar novels of the time. Larsen's second novel, the play-like Passing, introduces two women, both sides of the same coin. Irene (our narrator) is a mixed-race woman married to black man and who lives in the black community. Clare is a mixed-race woman married to a virulently racist white man and now "passes" for white. (Some have said that Larsen herself "passed," but she was proud of her race and there is no evidence that she ever did so or even could have.) Clare wants to re-engage with the community of her childhood, despite the danger of being exposed, and thus we have a story. Again Larsen investigates the color line in America adding the additional complications of marriage and sexuality. Both are excellent novels that still have much to say beyond their historical interest. They should be a rich source for academic discourse. Of the two, I prefer Passing, but both are strong novels that can only make us sorrow that Nella Larsen was unable to publish in the last 34 years of her life. The legacy she left for us is rich, but too little. [4★]
Book Review: The Complete Fiction of Nella Larsen amply demonstrates that Larsen (1891-1964) had a ridiculously and tragically short literary career, and it's worth looking at her life just to see why it was so brief. The biracial Larsen, a nurse and soon to become a librarian, married Elmer Imes (one of the few black physicists in America) in 1919, and they became part of the Harlem bourgeois and the Harlem Renaissance. She wrote two "commercial" stories under a pseudonym, published her first novel Quicksand (dedicated to her husband) in 1928, and followed it with the even more acclaimed Passing the next year. At that point she was one of the brightest stars of the Harlem Renaissance. The two novels were followed by a short story published in 1930, which led to charges of plagiarism. She never published again. Larsen traveled to Europe on a Guggenheim grant, writing a new novel Mirage (no manuscript has been found), returning in 1932. After learning of her husband's affair with a white woman the couple divorced in 1933. She acknowledged that "he broke my heart" and suffered from depression for several years. Mirage, concerned a woman who learns her husband is still in love with his first wife, and so she has an affair with a "cad." It was rejected by her publisher, as were her next two novels. At that point Larsen stopped writing. The Complete Fiction of Nella Larsen (2001, originally published in 1992) includes all that she published. Afterward, she retained her ex-husband's name, and later began a highly successful nursing career that lasted the rest of her life. She was always exceptional.
The first two stories Larsen published are competent and entertaining, but not earth shattering, not to the level of her novels. She called them her "hack writing," though I think the stories are better than that. Their greatest interest, however, may be for the purpose of re-examining them in light of Larsen's racial background and her unstable marriage. For example, one story concerns a woman who has risen from poverty to security, but fears that all could be lost in a moment. The other is about a man who abandons his mistress because of some "depravity" in her character. "The Wrong Man" and "Freedom," both published in 1926 under a pseudonym (the too-clever "Allen Semi"), are solid, though average (the writing is fine) at best, say nothing overtly about race, are ostensibly about white people, and both depend on an inartful surprise ending. Neither story seems to be from the Nella Larsen we know and love. The third story, "Sanctuary," was published in January 1930. It was soon recognized as plagiarized from "Mrs. Adis" (1922) by Sheila Kaye-Smith, which was set in England. Although the duplication is undeniable (the similarities are described as "striking," "telling," and "embarrassing"), Larsen refashioned "Mrs. Adis" to her own purposes. The story was about working-class American blacks, rather than the bourgeois blacks she wrote about in her novels and other stories. Her version also, atypically, included dialect (as did the original), but more significantly, the key plot twist depends on race loyalty, rather than simple friendship as in Kaye-Smith's story. Despite the poaching, I think Larsen's story is the more powerful. It's a shame that she didn't realize what she'd done or didn't do more to distinguish "Sanctuary," as it's a valuable addition to her work. I believe Larsen simply and deliberately retold the story in a new and more dramatic setting, but for some reason felt she couldn't acknowledge that. Quicksand, her first novel, told the story of a biracial woman seeking her identity, but unable to survive in either the black or white worlds. Our protagonist, Helga Crane, can be bold, daring, but also self destructive (as Larsen described it, the "sorry tale of a girl who got what she wanted"). She needs to, but can't escape from the expectations others place on her, living in a world that harshly enforces the rules of the color line (and sexuality), and denies a place for someone who doesn't fit as either black or white. The ending is despairing and claustrophobic. Apart from its notable social significance, Quicksand is a work of substantial literary merit, more complex then similar novels of the time. Larsen's second novel, the play-like Passing, introduces two women, both sides of the same coin. Irene (our narrator) is a mixed-race woman married to black man and who lives in the black community. Clare is a mixed-race woman married to a virulently racist white man and now "passes" for white. (Some have said that Larsen herself "passed," but she was proud of her race and there is no evidence that she ever did so or even could have.) Clare wants to re-engage with the community of her childhood, despite the danger of being exposed, and thus we have a story. Again Larsen investigates the color line in America adding the additional complications of marriage and sexuality. Both are excellent novels that still have much to say beyond their historical interest. They should be a rich source for academic discourse. Of the two, I prefer Passing, but both are strong novels that can only make us sorrow that Nella Larsen was unable to publish in the last 34 years of her life. The legacy she left for us is rich, but too little. [4★]
December 14, 2021
3.5 stars
This was a book originally published in 1928. However it was as up to date as anything I have read lately. My reason for getting this book was to read one particular story out of the 5 stories included - The Passing. The Passing was the second longest fiction story that Larsen wrote at 104 pages.
Set in the 1920's, the story of the Passing is about a Black women who decided to pass for a white woman. She ends up married to a bigot and begins to miss her Black life. When she runs into a old school mate she takes advantage of hanging onto her side and attending a number of Black social functions, at any time her husband had to travel out of town. As you read you know that this activity will soon lead to a bad ending. Then there is a twist at the end of the story that you do not see coming.
I enjoyed all of Nella Larsen's stories. It was rumored that she plagiarized her story Quicksand. Two of the other stories were very short novellas. A book well worth the read.
Now, on to the movie, with the same name, based on the story The Passing, which currently airs on Netflix.
This was a book originally published in 1928. However it was as up to date as anything I have read lately. My reason for getting this book was to read one particular story out of the 5 stories included - The Passing. The Passing was the second longest fiction story that Larsen wrote at 104 pages.
Set in the 1920's, the story of the Passing is about a Black women who decided to pass for a white woman. She ends up married to a bigot and begins to miss her Black life. When she runs into a old school mate she takes advantage of hanging onto her side and attending a number of Black social functions, at any time her husband had to travel out of town. As you read you know that this activity will soon lead to a bad ending. Then there is a twist at the end of the story that you do not see coming.
I enjoyed all of Nella Larsen's stories. It was rumored that she plagiarized her story Quicksand. Two of the other stories were very short novellas. A book well worth the read.
Now, on to the movie, with the same name, based on the story The Passing, which currently airs on Netflix.
June 1, 2022
I love Larsens' writing style, it's stylish for the 1920s and translates very well 100 years later. Whoa just realized there's a century between us! I sometimes hesitate to read classic s because it can take awhile to get into the rhythm of the time. I didn't like how one of the stories ended but that's my problem, so she still gets *****!
February 26, 2018
These stories were amazig. Larsen discusses the race problem in such a complex matter - it is either very forward, down played or ambiguous. These work of fictions are nothing to what I've read before. The main characters are real, struggling, and flawed - and I really enjoyed that.
January 13, 2022
Wow. Larsen’s stories have endings that hit you in the gut. I’d already read Passing, so I was curious about Quicksand. It starts so relatably, a young introverted teacher wondering what’s the point and rebelling against the system and indulging her wanderlust. But Helga Crane is something else entirely and has her own personal tragedy that I hope nobody is still subject to to quite the same extent (but I know the aspects of it are still rampant). She’s not likeable but you can’t really blame her, given her background and the American sociopolitical system, and she gets props for trying to find a place for herself and an identity that suits her, and listening to her intuition.
I’m struck by how these two novellas are very much about race but also have sharp takes on class, female friendships, marriage, motherhood, and education. They’re very feminist, with tenacious women who keep envisioning more for themselves and trying to make it a reality. I watched The Lost Daughter last week and Helga Crane and Clare Kendry are not unlike Lena Caruso or Nina in their fascinating, determined, somewhat sympathetic trainwreck ways.
Larsen’s three short stories are pulpy and memorable too, if not as hard-hitting because they’re so short.
I’m struck by how these two novellas are very much about race but also have sharp takes on class, female friendships, marriage, motherhood, and education. They’re very feminist, with tenacious women who keep envisioning more for themselves and trying to make it a reality. I watched The Lost Daughter last week and Helga Crane and Clare Kendry are not unlike Lena Caruso or Nina in their fascinating, determined, somewhat sympathetic trainwreck ways.
Larsen’s three short stories are pulpy and memorable too, if not as hard-hitting because they’re so short.
October 22, 2022
Alas this author did not receive her due at the time she was actively writing. Imagine how her creative voice and unique experiences could have been nurtured in a time when she was viewed not as mere novelty, but instead championed, encouraged, actively edited, and promoted. Would she had continued writing beyond this initial phase. Alas.....we shall never know. And now, we must ALL do better to recognize, promote, and support authors in their infancy so that they grow into the authors we cherish.
September 3, 2024
A while back, I read "Passing" by Nella Larsen and was blown away by her fierce courage in writing that book when she did. Almost a hundred years ago, she dared to tackle race and American life in a way that few novelists, Black or white, dared to at that time. For a long time, I wanted to read her previous novel "Quicksand," but I hadn't been able to find a copy except this omnibus collection of her works. I generally avoid anything like an omnibus or "collected stories" just because I'm weird like that, but I finally broke down and decided to pick this up at the local library.
"The Complete Fiction of Nella Larsen" is, indeed, that, with three of her stories and the complete texts of her two novels, "Quicksand" and "Passing." The stories, slight though they are in comparison to her longer works, are entertaining enough and mine much of the same territory as her novels: the mixing of races and how that affects women in a society where they are unable to assimilate into one or the other of their identities. Larsen, herself the product of a mixed-race couple, writes tenderly but honestly about the struggles that face these women, and what they can do to survive in a hostile world.
The main reason I came to this book, however, was for "Quicksand," and while early on I wasn't quite as enamored with it as I was with "Passing," I found a lot to like. Helga Crane, orphan child of a Black man and a white, Danish woman, struggles to find herself in a world where her biracial identity is not tolerated. She goes from one extreme to another, with happiness just out of reach because of her own stubbornness or because of the casual cruelties of those around her, whether white or Black. She doesn't fit in anywhere, except perhaps with the man she ultimately loves, but he isn't available to her. As her life continues to reach peaks and sink into valleys, she tries desperately to find herself, despite sinking ever further in the metaphorical quicksand of life as a mixed-race woman, welcome in neither white not Black spheres of life.
Larsen really reached the heights of her talent with "Passing," but the stories and "Quicksand" show her imagination working well from the beginning. There's something fierce and combative about her prose, about her willingness to make women who might otherwise be sympathetic more real because they often are not, because they lack the ability to see themselves except through the eyes of those who judge them harshly. "The Complete Fiction" is a necessary corrective to any notions that Black female writing began with Toni Morrison and Alice Walker. It actually began far earlier than that, and Nella Larsen is a part of that legacy alongside Ida B. Wells and Zora Neale Hurston. And her work deserves to be talked about in such esteemed circles.
"The Complete Fiction of Nella Larsen" is, indeed, that, with three of her stories and the complete texts of her two novels, "Quicksand" and "Passing." The stories, slight though they are in comparison to her longer works, are entertaining enough and mine much of the same territory as her novels: the mixing of races and how that affects women in a society where they are unable to assimilate into one or the other of their identities. Larsen, herself the product of a mixed-race couple, writes tenderly but honestly about the struggles that face these women, and what they can do to survive in a hostile world.
The main reason I came to this book, however, was for "Quicksand," and while early on I wasn't quite as enamored with it as I was with "Passing," I found a lot to like. Helga Crane, orphan child of a Black man and a white, Danish woman, struggles to find herself in a world where her biracial identity is not tolerated. She goes from one extreme to another, with happiness just out of reach because of her own stubbornness or because of the casual cruelties of those around her, whether white or Black. She doesn't fit in anywhere, except perhaps with the man she ultimately loves, but he isn't available to her. As her life continues to reach peaks and sink into valleys, she tries desperately to find herself, despite sinking ever further in the metaphorical quicksand of life as a mixed-race woman, welcome in neither white not Black spheres of life.
Larsen really reached the heights of her talent with "Passing," but the stories and "Quicksand" show her imagination working well from the beginning. There's something fierce and combative about her prose, about her willingness to make women who might otherwise be sympathetic more real because they often are not, because they lack the ability to see themselves except through the eyes of those who judge them harshly. "The Complete Fiction" is a necessary corrective to any notions that Black female writing began with Toni Morrison and Alice Walker. It actually began far earlier than that, and Nella Larsen is a part of that legacy alongside Ida B. Wells and Zora Neale Hurston. And her work deserves to be talked about in such esteemed circles.
August 1, 2017
Nella Larsen was one of the most important writers of the "Harlem Renaissance" of the 1920s. Apart from three rather forgettable short stories, this book contains Larsen's two published novels. (A third later novel was rejected by the publishers and is apparently lost.) One of my Goodreads groups is reading Passing next month; I will review that separately in the Norton Critical edition. This review will focus on her other, somewhat less known novel, Quicksand. The protagonist, Helga Crane, is like Larsen herself of mixed Danish and Black ancestry; her Black father abandoned her white mother and she and her white second husband were embarassed by Helga's existence. In addition to the objective rejection of Helga as a mixed raced child, a theme which was already common in Black literature, Larsen shows the psychology of the girl herself, her internalization of her parents' dislike, such that she can not identify for very long with either race. She despises the educated Black elite to which she initially belongs for trying to imitate white behaviors, but also despises the Blacks who are uneducated as vulgar.
Reading this a month or so after reading Colin Whitehead's Underground Railroad, my first impression was that there was a similarity in the way the two books were structured; although Whitehead's book is deliberately chronologically ambiguous, showing many different periods as simultaneous, while Larsen's novel deals realistically with a definite period of history (the 1920's), both use geography to explore the different aspects of Black experience.
Quicksand begins with Helga as a teacher in a Black "Uplift" school, which reminded me of Whitehead's "Charleston", a "liberal" institution which attempts to "raise" Blacks to a higher but still subordinate place in white dominated society. Rebelling against that, she moves to Harlem, where Blacks live apart with a certain freedom to be Black, but bounded by poverty and the discrimination of the surrounding white city. Her third move is to Copenhagen, where she is more or less exhibited as an exotic; not considered as inferior but definitely as different, and her uniqueness is still defined by her racial identity rather than her personal identity. She than moves back to the United States, and ends up in a small Southern town where she tries to fit into the mold of uneducated Black society (and traditional domestic and religious life). With each move she becomes more deeply trapped, hence the title. I found the love theme and the Alabama ending as somewhat poorly motivated, and not of the same quality as the earlier chapters. Taken as a whole, however, this was a very good novel and one I would highly recommend.
Reading this a month or so after reading Colin Whitehead's Underground Railroad, my first impression was that there was a similarity in the way the two books were structured; although Whitehead's book is deliberately chronologically ambiguous, showing many different periods as simultaneous, while Larsen's novel deals realistically with a definite period of history (the 1920's), both use geography to explore the different aspects of Black experience.
Quicksand begins with Helga as a teacher in a Black "Uplift" school, which reminded me of Whitehead's "Charleston", a "liberal" institution which attempts to "raise" Blacks to a higher but still subordinate place in white dominated society. Rebelling against that, she moves to Harlem, where Blacks live apart with a certain freedom to be Black, but bounded by poverty and the discrimination of the surrounding white city. Her third move is to Copenhagen, where she is more or less exhibited as an exotic; not considered as inferior but definitely as different, and her uniqueness is still defined by her racial identity rather than her personal identity. She than moves back to the United States, and ends up in a small Southern town where she tries to fit into the mold of uneducated Black society (and traditional domestic and religious life). With each move she becomes more deeply trapped, hence the title. I found the love theme and the Alabama ending as somewhat poorly motivated, and not of the same quality as the earlier chapters. Taken as a whole, however, this was a very good novel and one I would highly recommend.
April 26, 2022
This contained some of the more graceful and powerful writing that I encountered in the Harlem Renaissance course that I took. Larsen had a short, strange career in writing, spending much of her life as a nurse and a librarian. She wrote one very successful novel (Quicksand), followed by another well received novel, and published a couple of short stories. After that, her career went downhill. She was accused of plagiarism and had a couple of novels rejected by her publisher, and pretty much stopped writing after that. This volume contains Quicksand and Passing (her second novel) and a few stories.
Quicksand is an excellent short novel, very well written, full of emotional power and succinct, hard hitting observation. At least partially autobiographical, it tells the story of Helga Crane, a young mulatto woman who travels from the black American South to Chicago to New York to Denmark in search of herself, and finds herself feeling trapped wherever she goes. She is too intelligent and abrasively independent for her own good, too quick to see the hypocrisies and bullshit that people live with as cornerstones of their lives. Ultimately she ends up the wife of a preacher and the mother of several young children.
Passing was a less engaging read from my point of view. It tells the story of a young woman named Clare Kendry who is "passing" as a white person and is married to a racist. The main character is one Irene Redfield, the dignified, respectable wife of a Harlem doctor. [SPOILER ALERT] As the book continues, it transpires that Clare is having an affair with Irene's husband. At the end tragedy strikes as Clare's husband bursts in on a party accusing his wife of being a n***r, and she leaps from a window to her death (or was she pushed by Irene?). Some of the book is a little hard to swallow, and it simply does not have the narrative force that Quicksand did.
Quicksand is an excellent short novel, very well written, full of emotional power and succinct, hard hitting observation. At least partially autobiographical, it tells the story of Helga Crane, a young mulatto woman who travels from the black American South to Chicago to New York to Denmark in search of herself, and finds herself feeling trapped wherever she goes. She is too intelligent and abrasively independent for her own good, too quick to see the hypocrisies and bullshit that people live with as cornerstones of their lives. Ultimately she ends up the wife of a preacher and the mother of several young children.
Passing was a less engaging read from my point of view. It tells the story of a young woman named Clare Kendry who is "passing" as a white person and is married to a racist. The main character is one Irene Redfield, the dignified, respectable wife of a Harlem doctor. [SPOILER ALERT] As the book continues, it transpires that Clare is having an affair with Irene's husband. At the end tragedy strikes as Clare's husband bursts in on a party accusing his wife of being a n***r, and she leaps from a window to her death (or was she pushed by Irene?). Some of the book is a little hard to swallow, and it simply does not have the narrative force that Quicksand did.
September 26, 2021
wow, what a life of work. i think it's more advantageous to read an author's work back to back along with the context of their life especially when there work is very closely autobiographical. the progression of her authorial voice from story to story was nice to see.
from larsen's own life to her consistent thematic considerations of the race problem, double consciousness, colorism, marriage - the horror of marriage specifically and masterfully the way her stories unfold as the drama reaches it's climax was fantastic. i picked this up in anticipation of the upcoming netflix adaptation and boy from the discussions on twitter, larsen's work will always be relevant. even without the explosion of discourse when the trailer dropped, it still would. there are many scholarly observations that have been perused for classroom instruction that she has succinctly and vividly condensed here in her work. she's truly captured at least in 3 distinct ways the terror of keeping secrets in marriage, the strange but ubiquitous social, psychological and emotional effects of the concept of race that dogs us all whether we like it or not and the internal fright of how disillusionment and discontent can tear someone apart over and over again. 5/5 stars.
from larsen's own life to her consistent thematic considerations of the race problem, double consciousness, colorism, marriage - the horror of marriage specifically and masterfully the way her stories unfold as the drama reaches it's climax was fantastic. i picked this up in anticipation of the upcoming netflix adaptation and boy from the discussions on twitter, larsen's work will always be relevant. even without the explosion of discourse when the trailer dropped, it still would. there are many scholarly observations that have been perused for classroom instruction that she has succinctly and vividly condensed here in her work. she's truly captured at least in 3 distinct ways the terror of keeping secrets in marriage, the strange but ubiquitous social, psychological and emotional effects of the concept of race that dogs us all whether we like it or not and the internal fright of how disillusionment and discontent can tear someone apart over and over again. 5/5 stars.
February 12, 2022
After watching the outstanding, well cast Netflix movie version of Nella Larsen‘s novella, Passing, I had to read the story. Having read it, I can only conclude that Passing is a highly original and entertaining masterpiece of style, characterization, plot and subtle ambiguity. Published in 1929, during the Harlem renaissance, Larson’s novella portrays the relationship between two black women, Irene, the wife of a doctor, and Clare, a fair skinned negro who has used her white appearance to marry an unknowing racist businessman. Maybe even more fascinating is the life that author Nella Larsen led. She was born to a white woman and black man. Her mother remarried a white man, and while the details of Larsen‘s childhood are unclear, it appears she was rejected by them. The main character of her story, Quicksand, was similarly rejected. Nella became a nurse and didn’t actually publish her first stories until she was almost 30. The two novellas and three short stories in this 275 page collection, the sum total of Larson’s output, are about African-American characters, carefully drawn, real people living in racist America of the 1920s. After the last story she wrote, Sanctuary, was published, Larson was accused of plagiarism. She tried to publish a few other novels (I wish I could get copies), but they were rejected, not necessarily because of the plagiarism accusation. She returned to nursing and never wrote another thing. I can only wonder what wonderful art the world of literature lost.
May 29, 2018
This edition was excellent in including both some introductory biographical information about Larsen but also some interpretation of her works included in the collection. I’d never heard of this author but found these stories vibrant and moving. While brief, “The Wrong Man” is a little snippet of a larger picture that ends with quite a shock. The short stories “Freedom” and “Sanctuary” did not impact me as deeply but were interesting. Of the two longer stories, I found both “Passing” and “Quicksand” interesting but enjoyed “Passing” a bit more. The heroine of “Quicksand” is always off-balance, running towards someplace else she feels she will belong and I was frankly tired by the time the end was reached. “Passing” has a lot going on including a number of kinds of passing, thoughts on the good and bad of passing and complex, richly developed characters. Lots of important ideas in all these stories and much to think on. This was a great work to read slowly, thinking about and savoring the themes and ideas.
April 2, 2023
Disappointing. Larsen writes splendidly, with finely drawn characters that breathe with a life of their own. But the stories, however well they begin, eventually get bogged down in repeating patterns of mundanity and oddness, and at the end they simply expire without a point or message. Even if the mundanity is the point, it's entirely wrapped up in the frustrating acts of the main characters, so that message is lost. With the exception of Passing, there are no lessons here, or really anything to remember, despite the snippets of everyday life in a time long past - and as well crafted as the stories begin and continue thru the middle, they truly become a slog.
2.5 stars rounded up to 3 because this obscure author remained lost for so long, and the Harlem Renaissance writers deserve all we can give them.
2.5 stars rounded up to 3 because this obscure author remained lost for so long, and the Harlem Renaissance writers deserve all we can give them.
Want to read
November 18, 2020Passing (read Nov 2020) 4-star
Nella Larsen has told a tightly woven story of Self and Race. Who are we? What are we? How do we identify ourselves? How and where do we fit into Society?
Clare and Irene are two light skinned AfroAmericans in 1927. One has "passed", left her roots behind, married a white man who doesn't realize her heritage, passes and lives as a white woman. The other lives as a privileged AfroAmerican but can conveniently "pass" as white if and when she likes. But she lives and is known in her circle as coloured.
The story of their friendship and it's consequences is tightly written and very gripping from the first to the last page.
My first read by Nella Larsen but not my last. I'm looking forward to the rest of these stories.
Nella Larsen has told a tightly woven story of Self and Race. Who are we? What are we? How do we identify ourselves? How and where do we fit into Society?
Clare and Irene are two light skinned AfroAmericans in 1927. One has "passed", left her roots behind, married a white man who doesn't realize her heritage, passes and lives as a white woman. The other lives as a privileged AfroAmerican but can conveniently "pass" as white if and when she likes. But she lives and is known in her circle as coloured.
The story of their friendship and it's consequences is tightly written and very gripping from the first to the last page.
My first read by Nella Larsen but not my last. I'm looking forward to the rest of these stories.
December 2, 2017
Excellent read, especially the two novels. The short stories don’t stand out for me, and I did notice some repetitions and stylistic choices that I found a bit annoying when I read the two novels back to back, which I hadn’t noticed when I read Passing the first time. But these are overshadowed by the complexity of the characters and the wonderful observations about identity and belonging. The writing feels modern and still very much relevant. I wish more of her writing had been published.
November 27, 2019
This book was so raw and uncut I personally felt so connected to Helga Crane. Having a past and trying to not let her past dictate her future (which is a easier said thing than done) in a world where she feels she does not belong but try hard as she might to make her way through. Regardless of race what color I'm sure all of us have had trouble when it comes to feeling as if you do not belong or trying to get in as they say get it where you can fit in.
February 20, 2018
Read "Quicksand" for my American Urban Societies Lit class.
November 13, 2021
I'm so grateful the recent adaptation of Passing brought Nella Larsen to my attention.
June 9, 2021
What a fast and fascinating read! This novel may be short but many complex issues. Can’t wait to discuss the ending with my book club friends. I will have to read Quicksand
May 11, 2023
Nella Larson is an author deserving of much greater name recognition than currently. While the general tone and her themes of class, wealth and social mobility (oddly, and perhaps perversely) reminded me of Edith Wharton, Larson's confronting and nuanced exploration of race and identity is where she truly shines. A true tragedy she didn't produce more work: few authors cover more ground as succinctly and effectively as does Larson here.
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