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In April 1864, Julia C. Collins emerged out of anonymity in the small town of Williamsport, Pennsylvania, into the literary spotlight. Collins presented herself to readers nationwide, captured them with several didactic essays and a domestic novel, and then disappeared from history. All of Collins's known literary production, consisting of the serialized novel-The Curse of Caste; or The Slave Bride-and six essays, were published in the African Methodist Episcopal Christian Recorder, a leading 19thcentury African American newspaper with a nationwide circulation and a large, mostly African American audience both literate and non-literate.1 When Collins died in November 1865-just 19 months after her publishing debut-her voice was silenced for more than a century.
Today few scholars have heard of Collins, and even fewer have actually read her work. Historian Mitch Kachun's recovery of Collins's writing in the archives is an important achievement.2 Collins's recovered texts have already reopened speculation begun in the nineteenth century about the author and about the novel's intended-though unfinished-ending.
As this special edition of African American Review demonstrates, questions about Collins's life, her antebellum aesthetics and Reconstruction politics and her place in the African American literary canon are already generating lively scholarly discussions. Oxford University Press's publication of Collins's essays and novel, The Curse of Caste; or The Slave Bride (2006), will enlarge the community of readers who can participate in discussions of Collins's work. This special issue of African American Review, devoted to Collins's life and work so as to situate it within the aims and sites of literary activity for 19th-century African Americans, launches unprecedented critical discussion of Collins and her work. The essays in this issue and in the Oxford edition by William L. Andrews and Mitch Kachun will initiate and shape the contours of future debate on Collins's work.
There is, in fact, much to debate. Collin's absence from history both before and after her brief literary career presents unusual challenges and opportunities for scholars. As Kachun explains, everything known for certain about Collins comes from what she published in the Christian Recorder and what contributors to the Recorder said about her. The magnitude of uncertainty enveloping Collins compels scholars to listen attentively to the subtleties of her expression, to interpret carefully remarks others made about her, and...