Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825-1911)
MSA SC 3520-12499

Sources:

“Frances E. W. Harper,” Britannica Biography Collection, ebscohost/Masterfile Premier (accessed July 12, 2007).

"Frances Ellen Watkins Harper", Biography Resource Center, www.galenet.com (Accessed May 1, 2007).

"France Ellen Watkins Harper, 1825-1911." New York Public Library-Digital Schomberg African American Women Writers of the 19th Century.  http://digilib.nypl.org/dynaweb/digs-b/wwm97253/@Generic__BookTextView/2094#X. (Accessed July 18, 2008) 97-104.

 Grohsmeyer, Janeen.  "Frances Harper," Unitarian Universalist Historical Society. http://www25.uua.org/uuhs/duub/articles/francesharper.html.  (Accessed July 16, 2007).

Reuben, Paul P. "Chapter 5: Frances Harper." PAL: Perspectives in American Literature- A Research and Reference Guide. http://web.csustan.edu/english/reuben/pal/chap5/harper.html. (Accessed July 18, 2007).

"Selected Poetry of Frances Ellen Watkins (1825-1911)." Representative Poetry Online. http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poet/344.html. (Accessed July 18, 2007).

"Voices From the Gaps: Women Writers of Color." The University of Minnesota. http://voices.cla.umn.edu/vg/Bios/entries/watkins_frances_ellen.html. (Accessed July 18, 2007).

Forest Leaves (c. 1845)

Christianity (1853)

Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects (1854)

The Two Offers (1859)-Short story that placed her as the first African American woman to publish a short story. Serialized in the Anglo-African.

Minnie's Sacrifice (1869), Serialized in The Christian Recorder-first of her three novellas published.

Moses: A Story of the Nile (1869)

Achan's Sin (1870)

Sketches of Southern Life (1872)
Electronic test available @ Electronic Text Center, University of Virginia Library. http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/HarLife.html.(Accessed July 18, 2007).

Fancy Etchings (1873,1874)

Sowing and Reaping:  A Temperance Story (1876-77), Serialized in The Christian Recorder-second of her three novellas published.

Trial and Triumph (1988-1989)-Serialized in The Christian Recorder-third of her three novellas published.

The Women's Christian Temperance Union and the Colored Woman (1888)

Light Beyond the Darkness (1890)

Iola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted (1892)-First full length novel, for which she is highly recognized today as both a historian and a proficient novelist.
Electronic text available @ New York Public Library-Digital Schomberg African American Women Writers of the 19th Century. http://digilib.nypl.org/dynaweb/digs/wwm97248/. (Accessed July 18, 2007).

The Martyr of Alabama and Other Poems (ca. 1894)

The Sparrow's Fall and Other Poems (1894)

Atlanta Offering: Poems (1895)
Electronic test available @ University of Michigan Humanities Text Initiative(HTI):  American Verse Project.  http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=amverse;idno=BAC5663.0001.001. (Accessed July 18, 2007).

Poems (1895)
Electronic test available @ Electronic Text Center, University of Virginia Library. http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/HarPoem.html. (Accessed July 18, 2007).

Idylls of the Bible (1901)

In Memoriam, Wm. McKinley (1901)

Compilations of Works

Foster, Frances Smith. A Brighter Coming Day: A Frances Ellen Watkins Harper Reader (edited and introduction by Foster). New York: Feminist Press at CUNY. 1990.

Graham, Maryemma, ed. Complete Poems of Frances E.W. Harper. New York: University of Oxford Press. 1988.

Harper, Frances E. W. Minnie's Sacrifice; Sowing and Reaping; Trial and Triumph; Three Rediscovered Novels. Boston: Beacon Press. 1994.

Secondary Sources

Berlant, Lauren. “Cultural Struggle and Literary History: African-American Women’s Writing.” Modern Philology: A Journal Devoted to Research in Medieval and Modern Literature 88.1(1990): 57-64.

Carby, Hazel V. Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist. New York: Oxford Universtiy Press, 1987.

Clark Hine, Darlene and Kathleen Thompson, “Resistance Becomes Rebellion,” in A Shining Thread of Hope:  The History of Black Women in America. New York: Broadway Books (1998) 120.

Collier-Thomas,  Bettye and Ann D. Gordon. “Frances Ellen Watkins Harper Abolitionist and Feminist Reformer 1825-1911.” in African American Women and The Vote, 1837-1965. Amherst, Mass: University of Massachusetts Press (1997) 41-65.

Dagbovie, Pero Gaglo. “Black Women Historians from the late 19th Century to the Dawning of the Civil Rights Movement.” Journal of African American History, 2004 89(3): 241-261.

Diggs, Marylynne. “Surveying the Intersection: Pathology, Secrecy, and the Discourses of Racial and Sexual Identity.” in Critical Essays: Gay and Lesbian Writers of Color. Ed. Emmanuel S. Nelson. New York: Haworth. 1993: 1-19.

Graham, Leroy. Baltimore: The Nineteenth Century Black Capital. Washington D.C.:  University Press of America (1982).

Elkins, M. “Beyond the Conventions-A Look at Frances E.W. Harper.”American Literary Realism (Winter 1990) 497-518.

Ernest, John. “From Mysteries to Histories: Cultural Pedagogy in Frances E.W. Harper’s lola Leroy.” American Literature 64.3 (1992): 497-513.

Hill, Patricia Liggins. “Let Me Make the Songs for the People: A Study of Frances Watkins Harper’s Poetry.” Black American Literature Forum, 15 (1981): 60-65.

“Not in a Land of Slaves; Suffragist: Frances Ellen Watkins Harper…” The Baltimore Sun. February 6, 1999.

Karcher, Carolyn.  “Reconceiving Nineteenth-Century American Literature: The Challenge of Women Writers." American Literature, vol. 66(4) December (1994) 781-793.

Peterson, Carla L. ‘Doers of the Word’: African American Women Speakers and Writers in the North (1830-1880) New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.

Petrino, Elizabeth. “We are a Rising People: Frances Harper’s Radical Views on Class and Racial Equality in Sketches of Southern Life." American Transcendental Quarterly: 19th Century American Literature and Culture. Kingston: University of Rhode Island, vol. 19(2), (June 2005)

Riggins, Linda N. “The Works of Frances E.W. Harper.” Black World (Dec. 1972): 30-36.

Young, Elizabeth. “Warring Fictions: lola Leroy and the Color of Gender." American Literature: A Journal of Literary History, Criticism, and Bibliography. 64.2 (1992): 273-297.

Still, William. "The Underground Railroad. A record of facts, authentic narratives, letters, etc." Located at the Maryland State Archives, Annapolis, MD.

Updated July 18, 2007 by Jenette Parish, summer intern 2007.

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