Iola Leroy: Or Shadows Uplifted

The Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers General Editor: HENRY LOUIS GATES, JR.

The past two decades have seen a dramatic resurgence of interest in black women writers, as authors such as Toni Morrison and Alice Walker have come to dominate the larger African-American literary landscape. Yet the works of the writers who founded and nurtured the black women’s literary tradition–nineteenth-century African-American women–have remained buried in research libraries or in expensive hard-to-find reprints, often inaccessible to twentieth-century readers.

Oxford University Press, in collaboration with the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, a research unit of The New York Public Library, rescued the voice of an entire segment of the black tradition by offering thirty volumes of these compelling and rare works of fiction, poetry, autobiography, biography, essays, and journalism. Responding to the wide recognition this series has received, Oxford now presents four more of these volumes in paperback (to add to the four already available). Each book contains an introduction written by an expert in the field, as well as an overview by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., the General Editor.