2 Books Published by Broadview Press on AALBC — Book Cover Collage

Click for more detail about Hagar’s Daughter: A Tale of Southern Caste Prejudice by Pauline Hopkins Hagar’s Daughter: A Tale of Southern Caste Prejudice

by Pauline Hopkins
Broadview Press (Oct 20, 2020)
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Hagar’s Daughter is Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins’s first serial novel, published in the Boston-based Colored American Magazine (1901-1902). The novel itself features concealed and mistaken identities, dramatic revelations, and extraordinary plot twists. In Part 1, Maryland plantation heirs Hagar Sargeant and Ellis Enson fall in love, marry, and have a daughter. However, Ellis’s covetous younger brother, St. Clair, claims that Hagar is of mixed-race ancestry, putting her and her infant in peril. When Ellis is presumed to be dead, St. Clair sells Hagar and her child into slavery, and they presumably die when Hagar, in despair, leaps into the Potomac River with her daughter. This is the backdrop for Part 2 (set twenty years later), which includes a high-profile murder trial, an abduction plot, and a steady succession of surprises as the young Black maid Venus Johnson assumes male clothing to solve a series of mysteries that are both current and decades-old.

The appendices to this Broadview edition feature advertising for the original publication, other writing by Hopkins and her contemporaries, and reviews that situate the work within the popular literature and political culture of its time.


Click for more detail about Iola Leroy: or, Shadows Uplifted by Frances E. W. Harper Iola Leroy: or, Shadows Uplifted

by Frances E. W. Harper
Broadview Press (Feb 15, 2018)
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Frances Harper’s fourth novel follows the life of the beautiful, light-skinned Iola Leroy to tell the story of black families in slavery, during the Civil War, and after Emancipation. Iola Leroy adopts and adapts three genres that commanded significant audiences in the nineteenth century: the sentimental romance, the slave narrative, and plantation fiction. Written by the foremost black woman activist of the nineteenth century, the novel sheds light on the movements for abolition, public education, and voting rights through a compelling narrative. This edition engages the latest research on Harper’s life and work and offers ways to teach these major moments in United States history by centering the experiences of African Americans. The appendices provide primary documents that help readers do what they are seldom encouraged to do: consider the experiences and perspectives of people who are not white. The Introduction traces Harper’s biography and the changing critical perspectives on the novel.