Known as the "Bronze Muse" to her broad audience, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper was the major black woman poet of the nineteenth century. She achieved high distinction and great popularity as an antislavery orator and poet who turned to the causes of temperance and woman suffrage after the Civil War. A trained seamstress, Harper gave up an early career in the domestic arts, choosing instead to earn her living as a public lecturer, which she did until she was nearly eighty, when she officially retired. Her significance lies in her involvement in the major movements of the latter nineteenth and early twentieth century, and her writing resonates with the social, moral, political, and racial causes to which she dedicated herself.

Harper was a remarkably independent woman and an ambitious writer of poetry and fiction; she wrote Iola Leroy (1892), the second of a handful of novels written by American...