These years also saw crucial discoveries that widened our sense of Harper’s oeuvre -especially, in 2000, with Foster’s edition of three of her novels that were serialized in the African Methodist Episcopal Church newspaper, the Christian Recorder, but never published between boards. Scholars like Foster, Hazel Carby, Carla Peterson, Maryemma Graham, and John Ernest alerted us to her writing’s breadth and its multi-faceted depth, reminded us of how much Harper’s contemporaries valued her work, and pushed us to think about the contexts surrounding both production and reception. The years that followed, though, saw a growing group of scholars argue for accepting Harper on her own terms. Photograph of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper in Hallie Q. One pro-Harper article published in 1988 was even titled “Is Frances Ellen Watkins Harper Good Enough to Teach?” But Harper’s work was still often dismissed as too didactic, too formulaic, too polemical. The next few years saw both a landmark edition of Harper’s poetry (part of Oxford’s Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers) and an omnibus multi-genre collection with immensely valuable apparatus ( A Brighter Coming Day: A Frances Ellen Watkins Harper Reader, edited by Frances Smith Foster). Even then, it was often Iola Leroy-Harper’s 1892 novel about slavery, Reconstruction, and racial struggle-that garnered attention after it was finally made available in paperback in 1987.
It wasn’t until the 1980s that Harper’s work moved more completely into American literary scholarship and its classrooms. Du Bois’s comments on her poetry and broader work: “She was not a great singer, but she had some sense of song she was not a great writer, but she wrote much worth reading.” Even supportive critics echoed the backhanded praise of W.E.B. Her work was initially kept from a white-dominated academy because of her race, gender, politics, and aesthetics. Harper (1825-1911) has gained a firm place in studies of American literature and culture, but that recognition came only grudgingly and remains far too limited. This find, shared in the current issue of Common-place, should push us to reconsider how we talk-and don’t talk-about an amazing poet, novelist, essayist, lecturer, and activist whose career spanned seven decades.
If you’re a student of African American literature or of the nineteenth century in the United States, you may have already heard about Johanna Ortner’s rediscovery of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s first book, Forest Leaves, which has long been assumed lost-perhaps even apocryphal.
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