[4] Set primarily in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City in the 1920s, the story centers on the reunion of two childhood friends—Clare Kendry and Irene Redfield—and their increasing fascination with each other's lives.

Clare Kendry's attempt to pass as white for her husband, John (Jack) Bellew, is significant and is a catalyst for the tragic events.

Praised upon publication, the novel has since been celebrated in modern scholarship for its complex depiction of race, gender, and sexuality, and the book is the subject of considerable scholarly criticism.

The story is written as a third person narrative from the perspective of Irene Redfield, an African-American woman of mixed race who could "pass" for white.

[9] The 1920s in the United States was a period marked by considerable anxiety and discussion over the crossing of racial boundaries, the so-called "color line" between blacks and whites.

[10] This anxiety was exacerbated by the Great Migration, in which hundreds of thousands of Blacks left the rural south for northern and midwestern cities, where, together with new waves of immigrants, they changed the social makeup.

[14] On the urging of his family, Leonard Kip Rhinelander, a wealthy white man, sued his wife, Alice Beatrice Jones, for annulment and fraud; he alleged that she had failed to inform him of her "colored" blood.

[23] The resulting feeling of exclusion was portrayed as variably manifested in self-loathing, depression, alcoholism, sexual perversion, and attempts at suicide.

The main characters, Irene and Clare, and their struggle with their own identification problems in the novel, help readers understand the difference between gender and race norms.

[29] Scholarly critics such as Mary Wilson have examined the character of Irene's maid Zulena, who demonstrates the middle-class African-American family in the 1920s.

For example, during Irene's attempt to pass to become an elite white woman at Drayton hotel, she makes a clear distinction between herself and working-class individuals by showing her desire to be separated from the "sweating masses".

Eugenic ideology assigns specific behavioral and physical traits to different distinctions of race, class, gender, and sexual identity.

For example, several times in the novel, Irene acknowledges the way white people racially designate physical traits to African Americans in order to identify them.

[6] The concept of eugenic ideology also emerges when Clare's aunts assign her to a domestic servant role believing this would align with her skin color.

[42] In the novel, Clare Kendry hides her racial identity from her husband and is able to travel to places where African Americans are not allowed entry because no one can denote her black heritage from her behavior.

[43] In addition, Irene notes several times in the novel that the physical traits white people assign to African Americans are ridiculous.

[46][47] As scholar Deborah McDowell's writes "the idea of bringing sexual attraction between two women to full narrative expression is, likewise, too dangerous a move, which helps to explain why critics have missed this aspect of the novel".

[48] In that interpretation, the novel's central metaphor of "passing" under a different identity "occurs at a surprisingly wide variety of levels," including sexual.

The novel describes Clare as "a sweetly scented woman in a fluttering dress of green chiffon whose mingled pattern of narcissuses, jonquils, and hyacinths was a reminder of pleasantly chill spring days".

[52] The character of her husband, Brian, has been subject to a similar interpretation: Irene's labeling of him as queer and his oft-expressed desire to go to Brazil, a country then widely thought to be more tolerant of homosexuality than the United States was, are given as evidence.

While Irene expresses jealousy in her admiration of Clare's beauty and social charms, she is also susceptible to their seduction and eventually begins to suspect that her husband Brian might be influenced by them as well.

In her intensifying suspicions, Irene's jealousy develops into a fear of losing her family, and with it, the identity she has built for herself as a middle class black woman.

Scholars such as Catherine Rottenberg examine how Larsen's characters struggle against race and gender norms of "whiteness" in the United States.

Similarly, Irene identifies as black, but because she desires to feel safe and in control at all times in her life, she chooses to pass over only on occasion.

[28] Scholars such as Andrew W. Davis and Zahirah Sabir acknowledge Irene's psychology of safety and security, which likely originated from "the threat of racism" surrounding her family.

[59] When Brian desires to leave for Brazil, Irene is anxious due to the fact that New York is still a white society, and is a familiar to her as an African-American middle-class woman.

Du Bois hailed it as "one of the finest novels of the year" and believed that its limited success was due to its treating a "forbidden subject," the marriage of a white man to a mixed-race girl who did not reveal her ancestry.

"[64] In modern scholarship, Larsen is recognized as one of the central figures in the African-American, feminist and modernist canons, a reputation that is based on her two novels (Passing and Quicksand) and some short stories.

It has been hailed as a text helping to "create a modernist psychological interiority ... challenging marriage and middle-class domesticity, complexly interrogating gender, race, and sexual identity, and for redeploying traditional tropes—such as that of the tragic mulatta—with a contemporary and critical twist.

[70] The novel has been translated into numerous languages including Danish, German, French, Spanish, Arabic, Hebrew, Japanese, and Italian.