{"id":55810,"date":"2018-02-25T23:47:30","date_gmt":"2018-02-25T23:47:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=55810"},"modified":"2018-02-25T23:51:27","modified_gmt":"2018-02-25T23:51:27","slug":"what-do-meghan-markle-and-chicago-woman-who-wrote-passing-have-in-common","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=55810","title":{"rendered":"What do Meghan Markle and Chicago woman who wrote ‘Passing’ have in common?"},"content":{"rendered":"

What do Meghan Markle and Chicago woman who wrote ‘Passing’ have in common?<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The Chicago Tribune<\/a>
\n2018-02-23<\/p>\n

Christopher Borrelli<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/a>
\nNella Larsen<\/a>, author of “Passing<\/a>.” (Carl Van Vechten)<\/em><\/small><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

Nella Larsen<\/a> was a mystery in life, and a mystery after her death in 1964. According to biographers, when she died her half sister inherited the $35,000 that remained in Larsen\u2019s savings, then said she didn\u2019t know she had a half sister.<\/p>\n

Which wasn\u2019t true.<\/p>\n

Yet, in many ways, it\u2019s the response you expect.<\/p>\n

Nella Larsen was born Nellie Walker in 1891, in Chicago<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Or Nella Larsen was born Nella Larsen, 1892, in Chicago.<\/p>\n

Or Nella Larsen was born Nellye Larson, 1893, in Chicago.<\/p>\n

Biographers have run across a few possibilities, and the agreed-upon details are this: Nella Larsen was born in 1891, in Chicago, as Nellie Walker. Larsen fudged her vitals on occasion, depending on who was asking and what form she was completing. She lived her life at times with a sort of concentrated vagueness \u2014 \u201cin the shadows,\u201d wrote George Hutchinson<\/a>, one of her biographers<\/a>. Just as her career was taking off, she broke ties with her closest friends, and she spent her last three decades working as a nurse, living in a relative, self-imposed anonymity. Which sounds melodramatic, yet Larsen \u2014 who had been a major star of the Harlem Renaissance<\/a> after leaving Chicago (but never quite cast aside the rejection that she felt here) \u2014 lived a life that could fuel melodramas.<\/p>\n

As it happens, she left great ones, slim novels that amount to 250 pages, combined. Indeed, \u201cQuicksand<\/a>\u201d (1928) and \u201cPassing<\/a>\u201d (1929) constitute most of her published work. Yet both are portraits of Chicago women who, like Larsen, navigated the blurriest of racial lines in the early 20th century, having been born to one black parent and one white parent. Both novels are about women who \u201cpassed<\/a>\u201d \u2014 that is, they presented themselves, day to day, as white. Her biographers say it\u2019s unlikely Larsen herself did this, yet her protagonists are haunted by identity, frozen out by the black bourgeois, not at ease in white society, torn by the task of self-identifying in a binary-minded country…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Nella Larsen was a mystery in life, and a mystery after her death in 1964. According to biographers, when she died her half sister inherited the $35,000 that remained in Larsen\u2019s savings, then said she didn\u2019t know she had a half sister.<\/p>\n

Which wasn\u2019t true.<\/p>\n

Yet, in many ways, it\u2019s the response you expect.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,1245,1196,8,6462,20,25],"tags":[28091,17671,3027,2805,28090,6465,5488,20717,28092,87,10721,11554],"class_list":["post-55810","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-biography","category-literary-criticism","category-media-archive","category-passing-2","category-usa","category-women","tag-adrienne-brown","tag-amina-gautier","tag-chicago","tag-chicago-tribune","tag-christopher-borrelli","tag-emily-bernard","tag-illinois","tag-meghan-markle","tag-michelle-dean","tag-nella-larsen","tag-thadious-davis","tag-the-chicago-tribune"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55810","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=55810"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55810\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":55814,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55810\/revisions\/55814"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=55810"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=55810"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=55810"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}