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In Lyrics of Sunshine and Shadow (2001), Eleanor Alexander attempted to provide answers to the many questions surrounding the mysterious and ultimately tragic courtship and marriage of Paul Laurence Dunbar and Alice Ruth Moore.1 This union has been the greatest asset in keeping Alice Dunbar-Nelson from a fate, like many of the African American women writers of the turn-of-the-century and New Negro Movement, of ultimate obscurity.2 Alice Dunbar-Nelson, prior to becoming Mrs. Dunbar, was as equally ambitious as her husband and had set herself on a path of individual achievement and fame.3 Despite having entered the world of African American belles-lettres with a volume of her own prior to her marriage, she was not respected as a serious and talented writer until Gloria T. Hull's archival work of recovering and reinventing her reputation, along with that of Angelina Weld Grimke and Georgia Douglass Johnson, in Gloria T. Hull's Color, Sex and Poetry (1987). Hull's recovery of Dunbar-Nelson serves to convince today's readers of the importance of examining her apart from the Dunbar mystique4; but Hull confines much of her discussion of the author's production to the historical period of the Harlem Renaissance (despite two volumes appearing prior to 1900) and the genre of poetry (despite the bulk of her work in prose). As a literary foremother - the first African American woman to publish a collection of short stories - we must examine Dunbar-Nelson as a writer negotiating the many challenges of being a black woman at the turn of the century under the constraints of very strict gender and race roles. In her text, Hull issues a call for new examination of the author: "Of these three writers, it is Dunbar-Nelson whose literary position calls for the most radical revision."5
Hull presents a sympathetic argument regarding Dunbar-Nelson's duality and fragmentation of self and work, more common for the period than we may have expected. She had attempted to make a firm distinction between imaginative literature and journalism, reserving her political discussions, and especially her criticism of racial oppression, for the latter.6 I respond to Hull's call by arguing that Dunbar-Nelson's life and work should be read as a courageous testimony of breaking barriers, crossing borders and attempting to redefine roles and genres.
In addition...