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Nella Larsen was born in 1891 in a white, working-class neighborhood in Chicago, Illinois. Her mother was a white immigrant from Denmark, while her father was a mixed-race Afro-Caribbean immigrant from the Danish West Indies, making Larsen a mixed-race child. When Larsen was two, her father abandoned the family, and her mother later remarried another Danish immigrant, from whom Larsen took her last name. Like Clare Kendry, Larsen was caught between two different races and cultures. During childhood, Larsen attended schools with mainly white classmates from Scandinavian backgrounds like her own, but it wasn’t until she moved to New York City as an adult that she was able to connect with the other side of her racial identity. She attended Lincoln School for Nurses in the Bronx, where she was surrounded by other Black women. She then met and married Elmer Imes, the second Black man in the United States to receive a PhD in Physics. The couple was welcomed into the Black intellectual community of New York City, which included literary greats such as Langston Hughes and W. E. B. Du Bois. Once again, Larsen didn’t quite fit in with these visionaries, many of whom had strong Black heritage and were proudly descended from freed slaves. Larsen began to display both interest and talent in literature and writing, penning several short stories and a well-received novel titled Quicksand before publishing Passing in 1929. Both novels, written in the modernist tradition, examine the constraints and torments caused by gender and race, particularly the nebulous experience of being mixed-race or white passing.
The domestic woes of Passing also mirror, to some degree, the problems that would arise within Larsen’s own marriage. While Larsen and Imes would not divorce until years after the publication of Passing, parts of the novel’s depiction of the breakdown of Irene and Brian’s relationship uncannily resembles that of Larsen and Imes’s relationship. Namely, while living in Nashville for a teaching position, Imes was involved in an ongoing affair with a white colleague. That both Imes and the character Brian Redfield chose to engage in liaisons with women in their social circle who were white or closest in proximity to whiteness is notable.
In style, Larsen’s Passing took a different approach to excavating race and gender issues than other writers in her time period or prior. During the 19th and early 20th centuries, the white supremacist and racist ideology in the United States was so severe that, particularly in the South, civil rights protests were often met with lynchings. Thus, many Black leaders turned to rhetoric to slowly and more safely change the minds of the nation. Wealthy and educated Black people especially were shouldered with the task of “racial uplift,” which denoted doing deeds or producing artistic works that cast the Black American in a positive and sympathetic light. However, as Corinne E. Blackmer says in her article “The Veils of Law: Race and Sexuality in Nella Larsen’s Passing,” Larsen “eschewed nineteenth-century ‘racial uplift’ rhetoric,” which was a reasonable and effective rhetorical method but was also capable of producing an image of Black people and race that was stripped of its nuance and depth. Instead, in keeping with the modernist tradition, Larsen’s work focused on the experience of individuals in relation to their racialized and gendered identity as well as to their general humanity. She utilized unflinching excavations of the characters’ inner worlds as the centerpiece of her narratives. While Larsen’s work was critically well-received at the time of publication, it also attracted some controversy – no doubt due to Passing’s intellectually honest yet bleak account of Black experiences and feminist undertones.
In the 1940s, Larsen returned to her former career in nursing and distanced herself from the intellectuals and artists of the Harlem Renaissance that once made up her main social circle. By the time she died in 1964, she had no ties left to her remaining family and her literary achievements had been relatively forgotten. However, as interest in marginalized historic voices has risen in the contemporary era, Larsen’s work has been rediscovered, leading to multiple new editions of Passing and a 2021 film adaptation.
