SOURCE: "Female Paradigms in Frances Harper's Iola Leroy and Pauline Hopkins's Contending Forces," in Mythic Black Fiction: The Transformation of History, The University of Tennessee Press, Knoxville, 1986, pp. 18-41.

In the following excerpt, Campbell discusses the works of two African-American novelists, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and Harriet E. Wilson, arguing that while they mythologized the lives of African Americans in their romances, Harper and Wilson also used their novels to discuss realities of African-American history.

The period between the first publication of Clotel (1853) and that of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper's Iola Leroy; or Shadows Uplifted (1892) was a dormant one for black romancers. One major work emerged: Harriet E. Wilson's Our Nig; or Sketches from the Life of a Free Black (1859), the first black romance published in this country, explores the plight of a woman whose life as an indentured servant duplicates that of her enslaved sisters. That blacks...