She was one of the most promising writers to come out of the 1920s Harlem Renaissance, but died alone in obscurity. Her writings today are being revisited as they delve into the idea of race and sexuality in the black community.
Nella Larsen was born on April 13, 1891 in Chicagoto Mary Hanson, of Denmark, and Peter Walker, of the Danish West Indies. The family lived in a predominantly white, working-class neighborhood.
When she was two years old, her father disappeared. Her mother married another Dane, Peter Larsen. Nella’s sister, Anna, was born soon after. Historians have questioned whether Peter Walker was Peter Larsen. Larsen scholar Thadious Davis said this was the case as Mary, Peter, and Anna were light-skinned and could pass as white.
The family lived life as if they were white, but Nella’s complexion was darker and she often claimed later in life that her father shamed her for being visibly black.
Nella attended public schools until she was 16 years old. She moved to Nashville to attend the Fisk Normal School (Fisk University) to participate in a teacher training program. It was here she was first surrounded by people who were not white.
She struggled in school. She did not have the same experiences as her fellow black students from the south and was never accepted as white back home. She lived in between both worlds and belonged in neither.
According to, “In Search of Nella Larsen: A Biography of the Color Line,” by George Hutchinson, Nella was expelled from school for a violation of the dress code or conduct for women. Nella then lived in Denmark for four years. Upon returning to America, she continued to struggle with where she fit in.
She later enrolled at the Lincoln School for Nurses in the Bronx, New York. The school had been specifically founded to recruit and train black women to become nurses. Nella received her nursing degree in 1915 and was hired to be the superintendent of nurses at the Tuskegee Institute of Alabama.
She returned to the Bronx a year later and joined the staff at the Lincoln School. The doctors here were white and Nella continued to face racial issues no matter where she went.
Nella was hired by the city Bureau of Public Health as a nurse during the 1918 flu epidemic. Her patients and colleagues were mostly white.
In 1919, Nella married Elmer Imes, the second African-American to receive a Ph.D., in physics. This gave Nella a quick way into high society. The couple were involved with the Harlem Renaissance and regularly spent time with black intellectuals, such as W.E.B. Du Bois and Langston Hughes.
After volunteering to help prepare the New York Public Library’s first exhibition of African-American artists, Nella voiced her interest in literature. She enrolled in the library’s teaching program and graduated as the first black female.
She first taught on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, but transferred to the library’s location at 135th Street to be closer to home.
Nella wrote for many years under a pseudonym. The ideas of mixed-race, identity, and sexuality are central themes in her writings.
Her first novel, “Quicksand,” was published by Alfred A. Knopf and was well-received. The New York Times was among several publications to write positive reviews.
“Quicksand” follows mixed-race Helga Crane, a teacher at Naxos, a black boarding school in the South. Helga is unhappy that a person is judged by their whiteness there and leaves to search for her own identity. When she meets her mother’s white relatives, they find her contemptuous and simultaneously exotic in their white city.
Nella’s second novel, “Passing,” follows two mixed-race women, Irene Redfield and Clare Kendry. Irene learns Clare is married to a racist and has been living as a white woman. Each woman desires the other’s path in life and their relationship becomes a bit sensual.
Nella was an insightful writer and masterful at writing about what goes on in a person’s mind when it is divided and the person struggles to define who they really are.
She never published another novel and it seems as if there is a greater loss of Harlem Renaissance writing because of it. We don’t get to see where the road of identity ends or how much better of a writer she could have become because Nella’s career was destroyed by controversy in “Sanctuary,” one of her short stories.
Nella was accused of plagiarizing from British writer Sheila Kaye-Smith, who published “Mrs. Adis,” eight years earlier. Kaye-Smith’s publishers disagreed. They said Nella’s story was original. Nella’s editor attested to seeing several revisions of the story and that it was original.
In 2003, scholar H. Pearce said, “Sanctuary” was a better story as it is “longer, better written and more explicitly political, specifically around issues of race – rather than class as in ‘Mrs Adis.’
Pearce also notes that in Kaye-Smith’s 1956 book, “All the Books of My Life,” the author said she had based “Mrs Adis” on a 17th-century story by St Francis de Sales, Catholic bishop of Geneva.
Nella Larsen scholar Thadious Davis, however, said an honest look at the two stories reveal apparent and blatant plagiarism.
Nella was also dealing with Elmer’s affair with a white woman when the plagiarism accusations arose. At the same time, she was named the first African-American woman to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship in creative writing with the opportunity to travel to Europe. Nella traveled to Europe in 1930 to write her third novel and quietly left the limelight. She never found a publisher for the book.
She divorced Elmer in 1933 after she returned to America. He had moved to Nashville to work at Fisk University. She tried to make things work in Nashville, but moved back to New York. She then returned to nursing to support herself and purposely tried to hide herself.
Nella cut herself off from the artists and intellectuals in Harlem. She had no children and no connection to any living relatives. She disappeared into obscurity.
She was supported by alimony and finished two more novels and several short stories. None were ever published. Elmer died in 1942 and Nella moved from her 135th Street home to Second Avenue.
Davis provided some details of Nella’s ‘depression’ and ‘decline’ during the last three years of her life, revealing, ‘Her last months revolved around sleeping and reading during the day and working at Metropolitan at night.’ Larsen died while reading in bed during the last week of March, 1964; her body was discovered on March 30th after she had not reported to work for a week; she was buried on April 6, 1964.”
Even in death, her sister, Anna, despite being told she was going to inherit Nella’s $35,000 in savings, denied even knowing Nella existed.
Though she was forgotten for nearly a century, today Nella is considered one of the greatest of the Harlem Renaissance writers.
“Quicksand” is available as a free audiobook at Librivox and “Passing” can be read in a number of formats for free at the Internet Archive. You can purchase both books and short stories in a collection, available at Amazon.