Iola Leroy

Published in 1892, it is one of the first novels by Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825 –1911), an African American novelist, poet, essayist, journalist, orator, and activist. This work, telling of a beautiful young daughter of a wealthy white Mississippi planter and his mixed-race wife, deals with complex issues of race, gender, class, and politics in the United States. It touches upon slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction, representing the diversity of African American culture and heroic e