Nella Larsen

Nella Larsen (13 April 1891 – 30 March 1964) was an American novelist of the Harlem Renaissance whose two short, psychologically dense novels — Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929) — are now recognised as among the finest fiction produced by the movement. Larsen explored the intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality, and identity with a subtlety and ambiguity that were underappreciated in her own time and that have made her, since her rediscovery in the 1980s, one of the most critically examined American novelists of the early twentieth century.

Life

Larsen’s biography is itself a study in racial identity and self-invention. She was born Nellie Walker in Chicago, the daughter of a Danish woman (Mary Hanson) and a man of West Indian descent (Peter Walker). Her father disappeared or died when she was young, and her mother married a Danish man, Peter Larsen. Nella grew up in a white Danish household in a white neighbourhood — the only person of colour in her family — a situation that profoundly shaped her fiction’s preoccupation with belonging, passing, and the psychological costs of racial ambiguity.

She attended Fisk University in Nashville briefly (she was expelled, reportedly for violating the school’s dress code), travelled to Denmark, and trained as a nurse at Lincoln Hospital in New York. She worked as a nurse and then as a librarian at the 135th Street branch of the New York Public Library (now the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture), where she became acquainted with the literary figures of the Harlem Renaissance.

She married the physicist Elmer Samuel Imes in 1919 — one of the first African Americans to earn a Ph.D. in physics — and entered the intellectual and social circles of Harlem’s Black elite. She published Quicksand and Passing in rapid succession and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1930, the first Black woman to receive one.

Then, abruptly, she stopped writing. A plagiarism accusation against her short story “Sanctuary” (1930), her divorce from Imes, and a retreat from public life combined to silence her. She returned to nursing, worked for over twenty years at Gouverneur Hospital on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, and died in obscurity in 1964. Her body was not discovered for several days.

Quicksand (1928)

Larsen’s first novel follows Helga Crane — a woman of mixed Danish and Black parentage — as she moves restlessly from a Southern Black college to Harlem to Copenhagen to the rural South, searching for a place where she can be fully herself. In each setting, Helga finds aspects of her identity denied or constrained: at the college, she is stifled by respectability; in Harlem, she is valued for her exoticism; in Denmark, she is objectified as a racial curiosity; in the South, she is trapped by marriage, religion, and childbearing.

The novel’s power lies in its refusal to resolve Helga’s dilemma. There is no home for a woman who is neither fully Black nor fully white, neither fully respectable nor fully free. The novel’s ending — Helga buried in pregnancies and poverty in rural Alabama — is devastating precisely because it feels both arbitrary and inevitable.

W.E.B. Du Bois praised the novel; it won the Harmon Foundation’s bronze medal for literature.

Passing (1929)

Larsen’s masterpiece — one of the most analysed short novels in American literature — tells the story of Irene Redfield, a light-skinned Black woman living a respectable, controlled life in Harlem, and her childhood friend Clare Kendry, who has been “passing” as white and is married to a white man who does not know her racial identity.

The novel is ostensibly about racial passing — the practice of light-skinned Black people living as white — but it is also, and perhaps more importantly, about desire, jealousy, and the instability of identity. Irene’s obsession with Clare — an obsession that combines attraction, envy, moral disapproval, and barely acknowledged erotic desire — drives the narrative toward an ambiguous, violent climax.

The novel’s ending — Clare falls from a window during a party; whether she jumped, fell, or was pushed by Irene is deliberately unclear — has generated enormous critical debate. Queer readings of the novel, which interpret the relationship between Irene and Clare as a displaced erotic bond, have been particularly influential since the 1980s.

Rebecca Hall’s 2021 film adaptation, shot in black and white, brought the novel to a wide audience.

Collecting Larsen

Quicksand (1928, Knopf) in first edition brings $500–$2,000. Passing (1929, Knopf) brings $1,000–$5,000 — it is scarcer and more sought. Both novels were printed in small editions and are genuinely rare. Signed copies are extremely uncommon.