SOURCE: "Nuance and the Novella: A Study of Gwendolyn Brooks's Maud Martha," in Black Feminist Criticism: Perspectives on Black Women Writers, Pergamon Press, 1985, pp. 127-41.

In the following essay, Christian examines the social context and presentation of Maud Martha. According to Christian, Brooks's "emphasis on the black girl within the community is a prefiguring of black women's novels of the sixties and seventies, which looked at the relationship between the role of women in society and the racism that embattled the black community."

Maud Martha, Gwendolyn Brooks's only novel, appeared in 1953, the same year that Go Tell It On The Mountain, James Baldwin's first novel, was published. By that time, Brooks had already published two books of poetry, A Street in Bronzeville (1945) and Annie Allen (1949), for which she won the Pulitzer Prize. But although she was an established poet, Brooks's novel quietly went out of print while Baldwin's...