Content area
Full text
Love across Color Lines: Ottilie Assing and Frederick Douglass. By Maria Diedrich. (New York: Hill and Wang, 1999. xxx, 480 pp. $35.00, ISBN 0-8090-1613-3.)
Ottilie Assing was a German journalist who for twenty-eight years was the constant companion and possibly the lover of Frederick Douglass. As we know from the start of Maria Diedrich's biography, Assing committed suicide shortly after Douglass's second marriage, to Helen Pitts, another white woman, in 1884. In his 1948 biography of Douglass, Benjamin Quarles elliptically connected Assing's suicide to her close friendship with Douglass; William S. McFeely's 1991 biography, which gives considerable attention to Assing, inspired Diedrich to explore this life and death in full.
The relationship commenced when Assing traveled to Rochester, New York, in 1856 to interview Douglass. She then spent every summer living with the Douglass family, but the offair was never confined to the domestic sphere, and it was never a secret. Despite the fact that Douglass's letters to Assing were burned, and only a...