Iola Leroy or, Shadows Uplifted, an 1892 novel by Frances Harper, is one of the first novels published by an African-American woman.
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Iola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted, is the story of Iola Leroy, beautiful young daughter of a wealthy white Mississippi planter and his mixed-race wife, a former slave he has freed and married. Iola is sent north to be educated and, after the death of her father, kidnapped, told that she has Negro blood, and is sold into slavery down south. In a plot that follows the conventions of the Tragic mulatto genre, Iola struggles to elude the depraved intentions of her various owners and, after she is freed by the Union Army, she seeks to find her scattered family members, to embrace her heritage, and to devote herself to improving the social and economic condition of blacks in America. Iola is supported in her struggle by her brother, Harry, who also refuses to pass as white, a devoted former slave, Tom Anderson, who rescues her from a lecherous master, and a newfound uncle, Robert Johnson, who introduces her to her dark-skinned grandmother Harriet.
After the war Leroy continues to embrace her heritage. She declines to pass for white when New England suitor Dr. Gresham makes it a condition of his proposal of marriage. He wants her to promise never to reveal her race.
Instead, Leroy marries Dr. Frank Latimer, who also has mixed ancestry and identifies with the black community. They return to North Carolina to fight for "racial uplift." The novel also features Iola's search for her family, from whom she was separated in the war. After a series of coincidences, the family is reunited.
Iola Leroy was for some time cited as the first novel by an African-American author. Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s 1982 rediscovery of Harriet Wilson's Our Nig (1859) displaced it from that spot. Later, William Wells Brown's 1853 novel Clotel, or the President's Daughter, although initially published in England, came to be viewed as the first novel by an African American author. Harper's novel remains important as one of the earliest novels written by an African American and as a fictional work dealing with complex issues of race, class, and politics in the United States.
Recent scholarship suggests that Harper's novel gives Americans a more sophisticated understanding of citizenship, gender, and community, particularly the way that African Americans developed hybrid forms of gemeinschaft and gesellschaft before, during, and after slavery.