Nella Larsen (born Nellie Walker) was an American novelist, nurse, and librarian. She published two novelsQuicksand (1928) and Passing (1929)and a few short stories.
A revival of interest in her writing has occurred since the late 20th century. Her works have been the subjects of numerous academic studies involving issues of racial and sexual identity, and she has been lauded as "not only the premier novelist of the Harlem Renaissance, but also an important figure in American modernism."
Early life and education
Nella Larsen was born Nellie Walker, in a poor district of south Chicago known as the Levee, on April 13, 1891 (though Larsen would frequently claim to have been born in 1893). Migrating to the USA around 1886 and going by the name Mary, Larsen's mother worked as a seamstress and domestic worker in Chicago. In the Danish West Indies, the law did not recognise racial difference, and racial lines were more fluid than in the former slave states of the United States. Walker may never have identified as "Negro." The mixed family moved to a mostly white neighborhood of German and Scandinavian immigrants on the South Side of Chicago, but encountered discrimination because of Nella.</blockquote>
From 1895 to 1898, Larsen lived in Denmark with her mother and her half-sister.
Nursing career
In 1912, Larsen enrolled in the nursing school at New York City's Lincoln Hospital and Nursing Home, an institution that was founded in the 19th century in Manhattan as a nursing home to serve black people, whose hospital services had grown in importance. While at Tuskegee, she was introduced to Booker T. Washington's model of education and became disillusioned with it. As it was combined with poor working conditions for nurses at Tuskegee, Larsen decided to leave after a year or so.
She returned to New York in 1916, where she worked for two years as a nurse at Lincoln Hospital. After earning the second-highest score on a civil service exam, Larsen was hired by the city Bureau of Public Health as a nurse. She worked for them in the Bronx through the 1918 flu pandemic, in "mostly white neighborhoods" and with white colleagues. Afterwards she continued with the city as a nurse.
Larsen passed her certification exam in 1923. She worked her first year as a librarian at the Seward Park Branch on the Lower East Side, which was predominantly Jewish. There she had strong support from her white supervisor Alice Keats O'Connor, as she had from Rose. They, and another branch supervisor where she worked, supported Larsen and helped integrate the staff of the branches. In 1926, having made friends with important figures in the Negro Awakening (which became known as the Harlem Renaissance), Larsen gave up her work as a librarian. She published short fiction under the pseudonym "Allen Semi" (an anagram of her married name, Nella Imes) in 1926.
She became a writer active in Harlem's interracial literary and arts community, where she became friends with Carl Van Vechten, a white photographer and writer.
In 1929, she published Passing, her second novel, which was also critically successful. "Sanctuary" was said to resemble the British writer Sheila Kaye-Smith's 1919 short story, "Mrs. Adis". Kaye-Smith wrote on rural themes and was popular in the United States. Some critics thought the basic plot of "Sanctuary," and some of the descriptions and dialogue, were virtually identical to Kaye-Smith's work. According to George B. Hutchinson, the plagiary accusation was "probably valid." Pearce thought that Larsen reworked and updated the tale into a modern American black context. Pearce also noted that in Kaye-Smith's 1956 book, All the Books of My Life, the author said she had based "Mrs Adis" on a 17th-century story by St Francis de Sales, Catholic bishop of Geneva. It is unknown whether she knew of the Larsen controversy in the United States. Larsen herself said the story came to her as "almost folk-lore", recounted to her by a patient when she was a nurse.
No plagiarism charges were proved. Larsen received a Guggenheim Fellowship even in the aftermath of the controversy, worth roughly $2,500 at the time, and was the first African-American woman to do so. She used it to travel to Europe for several years, spending time in Mallorca and Paris, where she worked on a novel about a love triangle in which all the protagonists were white. She never published the book or any other works.
Later life
Larsen returned to New York in 1937, when her divorce had been completed. She was given a generous alimony in the divorce, which gave her the financial security she needed until Imes's death in 1941. Struggling with depression, Larsen stopped writing. After her ex-husband's death, Larsen returned to nursing and became an administrator. She disappeared from literary circles. She lived on the Lower East Side and did not venture to Harlem.
Many of her old acquaintances speculated that she, like some of the characters in her fiction, had crossed the color line to "pass" into the white community. George B. Hutchinson has demonstrated that she remained in New York, working as a nurse.
Death
Larsen died in her Brooklyn apartment at 315 Second Avenue
In 2018, The New York Times published a belated obituary for her. She was inducted into the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame in 2022.
Larsen has been compared to other authors who also wrote about cultural and racial conflict such as Claude Mckay and Jean Toomer.
Larsen's novel Passing was adapted as a 2021 film of the same name by Rebecca Hall.
Works
Quicksand (1928)
Helga Crane is a fictional character loosely based on Larsen's experiences in her early life. Crane is the lovely and refined mixed-race daughter of a Danish white mother and a West Indian black father. Her father died soon after she was born. Unable to feel comfortable with her maternal European-American relatives, Crane lives in various places in the United States and visits Denmark, searching for people among whom she feels at home. As writer Amina Gautier points out, "In a mere 135 pages, Larsen details five different geographical spaces and each space Helga Crane moves to or through alludes to a different stage in her emotional and psychological growth."
Larsen's early life is similar to Helga's in that she was distant from the African-American community, including her African-American family members. Larsen and Helga did not have father figures. Both of their mothers decided to marry a white man with the hope of having a higher social status. Larsen wanted to learn more about her background so she continued to go to school during the Harlem Renaissance. Even though Larsen's early life parallels Helga's, in adulthood, their life choices end up being very different. Larsen pursued a career in nursing while Helga married a preacher and stayed in a very unhappy marriage.
Taking her uncle's legacy, Crane visits her maternal aunt in Copenhagen. There she is treated as an attractive racial exotic.
Critics were impressed with the novel.
Passing (1929)
While Quicksand focuses on a woman who is neither white nor black, Larsen's second novel, Passing, is fundamentally about the disturbance generated by a woman who is both white and black. The character Clare Kendry is described as "literally, both a black white woman and a white black woman."
Irene becomes furious that Clare did not tell her husband about her full ancestry. Irene believes Clare has put herself in a dangerous situation by lying to a person who hates blacks. After meeting Clare's husband, Irene does not want anything more to do with Clare but still keeps in touch with her. Clare begins to join Irene and Brian for their events in Harlem, New York while her husband is traveling out of town. Because Irene has some jealousy of Clare, she begins to suspect her friend is having an affair with her husband Brian.
The novel ends with John Bellew learning that Clare is of mixed race. At a party in Harlem, she falls out of a window from a high floor of a multi-story building, to her death, in ambiguous circumstances. Larsen ends the novel without revealing if Clare committed suicide, if Irene or her husband pushed her, or if it was an accident.
The novel was well received by the few critics who reviewed it. Writer and scholar W. E. B. Du Bois hailed it as "one of the finest novels of the year."
Later critics have framed the work as a sophisticated assault on the institution of race, George B. Hutchinson has claimed that Larsen’s attention to these themes was a deliberate choice used to explore deeper psychological and social complexities: