Invented Lives

Concentrating on carefully chosen selections from ten writers, Mary Helen Washington explores the work, the realities, and the hopes of black women writers between 1860 and 1960.
 
Featuring works by Harriet Jacobs, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Pauline E. Hopkins, Fannie Barrier Williams, Marita O. Bonner, Nella Larsen, Zora Neale Hurston, Ann Petry, Dorothy West, and Gwendolyn Brooks.
 
Praise for Invented Lives
 
“Mary Helen Washington has done more than any other single critic to expand the Afro-American and Anglo-American feminist canons.”—The Women’s Review of Books
 
“This collection is, in fact, two fine books in one: at once an anthology and a critical study.”—New York Times Book Review
 
“The forceful, uncompromising, and distinctive voice of Mary Helen Washington brings together foremothers and daughters . . . in a volume that presents . . . a century of black women’s writing along with a vital new tradition of black feminist criticism.”—Marianne Hirsch, Ms. MagazineAcknowledgments
INTRODUCTION
“The Darkened Eye Restored": Notes Toward a Literary History of Black Women

PART ONE

INTRODUCTION
Meditations on History: The Slave Woman’s Voice

HARRIET JACOBS
“The Perils of a Slave Woman’s Life” from Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1860)
Bibliographic Notes

PART TWO

INTRODUCTION
Uplifting the Women and the Race: The Forerunners—Harper and Hopkins

FRANCES ELLEN WATKINS HARPER
“Iola” from Iola Leroy (1892)
Bibliographic Notes

PAULINE E. HOPKINS
“Sappho” from Contending Forces (1900)
“Bro’r Abr’m Jimson’s Wedding: A Christmas Story” (1901)
Bibliographic Notes

FANNIE BARRIER WILLIAMS
“The Colored Girl” (1905)

PART THREE

INTRODUCTION
The Mulatta Trap: Nella Larsen’s Women of the 1920s

MARITA O. BONNER
“On Being Young—a Woman—and Colored” (1925)

NELLA LARSEN
“Helga Crane” from Quicksand (1928)

Bibliographic Notes

PART FOUR

INTRODUCTION
“I Love the Way Janie Crawford Left Her Husbands”: Zora Neale Hurston’s Emergent Female Hero

ZORA NEALE HURSTON
“His Over-the-Creek-Girl” from Jonah’s Gourd Vine (1934)
“Janie Crawford” from Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)
Bibliographic Notes

PART FIVE

INTRODUCTION
“Infidelity Becomes Her”: The Ambivalent Woman in the Fiction of Ann Petry

ANNE PETRY
“Mamie” from The Narrows (1953)
Bibliographic Notes

INTRODUCTION
I Sign My Mother’s Name: Maternal Power in Dorothy West’s Novel, The Living Is Easy

DOROTHY WEST
“Cleo” from The Living Is Easy (1948)
“My Mother, Rachel West” (1982)
Bibliographic Notes

PART SIX

INTRODUCTION
“Taming All That Anger Down”: Rage and Silence in the Writing of Gwendolyn Brooks

GWENDOLYN BROOKS

“The Courtship and Motherhood of Maud Martha” from Maud Martha (1953)
“The Rise of Maud Martha” (1955)
“Afterword” to Contending Forces (1968)
Bibliographic Notes

IndexMary Helen Washington is a critic, essayist, anthologist, and English professor at the University of Maryland. Previously she taught at the University of Massachusetts and was a Bunting Fellow at Harvard. She is the editor of numerous anthologies of black writing, including Black-Eyed Susans: Classic Stories by Black Women Writers; Midnight Birds: Stories of Contemporary Black Women Writers; Invented Lives: Narratives of Black Women; and Memory of Kin: Stories of Family by Black Writers.