Emma Dunham Kelley-Hawkins

On April 4, 1863, her father alongside her uncles, Johial Chase and Captain Hersey Crowell, were declared dead after disappearing off the coast of Rhode Island.

[1] According to scholars, owing to such factors as race and gender, much like other Black women writers at the time, Kelley-Hawkins’s works fell into obscurity and were mostly forgotten, even before her passing.

[1][3] Her work was later rediscovered by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., serving as an inspiration for him to compile the 40-volume Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers in 1988.

[1][3] While many African American writers at the time dealt explicitly with issues of race, Kelley-Hawkins's work did not treat themes of racial uplift.

[3] They were absent of Black characters and matters of race, instead focusing mainly on themes of religion and gender, while also addressing issues of education, region, social class, and so on.

[1][4] This treatment is similar to fiction by other black authors of the period, including selected works by Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Frank J. Webb, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and Amelia E. Johnson, for example.

Kelley-Hawkins’s novels, often considered anomalous among the African American literary tradition by presiding scholarship, follow the lives of young girls and are characterized by their Christian outreach, spiritual feminism, and the whiteness of their characters.

[2] During the reconstruction of lost or forgotten African American literature, Kelley-Hawkins’s race, alongside others whose biographies and identities were unknown, was assumed based on what clues scholars could gather.

[2] In fact, through numerous examinations of US and state census records of Massachusetts and Rhode Island as well as her ancestral towns of Dennis, Yarmouth, Harwich, and Chatham, it has been discovered that neither Kelley-Hawkins nor her family members have ever identified as anything other than white.

[1] Much scholarship has attributed the case of her racial misidentification to the frontispiece of her first novel, Megda, which for many, had served as indisputable evidence of her classification as African American.

[2] Many scholars have studied the lack of race in her novels, notions of raceless characters, racial passing, and so on, viewing her works as a tool to advance Black causes.