Iola Leroy Or Shadows Uplifted [Paperback]

The Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers
General Editor: HENRY LOUIS GATES, JR.
The past two decades have seen a dramatic resurgence of interest in black women writers, as authors such as Toni Morrison and Alice Walker have come to dominate the larger African-American literary landscape. Yet the works of the writers who founded and nurtured the black women's literary tradition--nineteenth-century African-American women--have remained buried in research libraries or in expensive hard-to-find reprints, often inaccessible to twentieth-century readers.
Oxford University Press, in collaboration with the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, a research unit of The New York Public Library, rescued the voice of an entire segment of the black tradition by offering thirty volumes of these compelling and rare works of fiction, poetry, autobiography, biography, essays, and journalism. Responding to the wide recognition this series has received, Oxford now presents four more of these volumes in paperback (to add to the four already available). Each book contains an introduction written by an expert in the field, as well as an overview by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., the General Editor.

Well worth including. I found it to be a wonderful addition--virtually all students responded well to it...sparked interesting, charged debates. --Sarah Dangelantonio,Franklin Pierce College

Probably the best-selling novel by an African-American before the twentieth century. --The New York Times

For all its heavy-handed moralizing, [Iola Leroy] purposefully fought the prevailing negative views about blacks. --Essence

Clearly Harper's words prove her awareness of the cultural and political functions of narrative. With its intricate plot, about a mulatto who first assumes she is white, subsequently learns she is the daughter of a slave ('the child follows the conditiolS!