"We always kept our mother busy in telling us stories, fairy tales, etc. She was so interesting to us for she was a writer, you know." So reminisced the son of Amelia Johnson, who published essays, stories, and novels as Mrs. A. E. Johnson during the late nineteenth century. For almost a century, Amelia Johnson disappeared from literary history, but the recent burst of interest in nineteenth-century African American women's writing has led to her reemergence. Johnson deserves to be studied not only because of her contribution to the tradition of the domestic novel popular in the nineteenth century but also because her writings embody the values and goals of the black Baptist women's movement of the late nineteenth century.

Biographical information about Johnson is sketchy. According to her obituary in the Afro-American (7 April 1922), Amelia Etta Hall Johnson was born in 1858, probably in Toronto, and raised in Montreal...