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Harper, Frances Ellen Watkins
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Popular with both African American and white audiences, Frances Ellen Harper's poetry, novels, short stories, and lectures reflected her antislavery and antiracist attitudes, going beyond these themes to address broader social issues, such as women's suffrage and temperance.
Born to a free family in Baltimore, Harper was encouraged to read and write by her employer, the wife of a bookseller. She moved to the free state of Ohio in 1850, where she taught, spoke for the Anti-Slavery Society of Maine, and published her popular Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects (1854). Her novel, Iola Leroy (1892), depicts a slave family's effort to reunite after emancipation. It was the first work to chronicle the Reconstruction South from an African American point of view. Although criticized by some as overly sentimental and unrealistic, the novel must be seen in context as an appeal for readers' sympathy and understanding.
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