Part intellectual history, part advice book, and part polemic, this collection of original essays and poetry is a defence and celebration of the achievements - moral, material, intellectual, and artistic - of black women in Victorian America. Writing as a Christian, a mother, and a wife, Mrs Mosell held exemplary models of black womanhood before the public eye. A source of instruction and inspiration in its own time, it remains today a valuable document of black American cultural and intellectual history.

"Pays an impressive tribute to the new renaissance in African-American literature." --New York Times Book Review "The cultural and literary achievements of black American women are examined and celebrated in some 20 enjoyable, erudite essays by prominent scholars, critics, and activists." --Publishers Weekly This book is the first comprehensive collection of critical and theoretical essays to explore the literary and multi-cultural traditions of Black American women in many genres over a broad span of time. The essays explore cultural and literary experience in a wide context and offer a...