Editing Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (section)

== Literary and Activist Career ==

Harper's poetry, collected in multiple volumes throughout her career, addressed the injustices she witnessed and the hopes she maintained for their remedy. Her best-selling "Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects" (1854) brought her work to audiences beyond the antislavery movement, while her continued production of verse maintained her literary reputation. Her poetry's accessibility—she wrote for general audiences rather than literary elites—reflected her commitment to reaching those who needed her message rather than those who might appreciate her technique.<ref name="boyd"/>

Her lecturing took her throughout the nation, her presence on platforms from Maine to Georgia demonstrating the breadth of her influence. Her oratorical skill, developed through decades of practice, commanded audiences that included those hostile to her message as well as those who shared her commitments. Her post-Civil War work for freedpeople's education and welfare extended her antislavery activism into the ongoing struggles that emancipation had not resolved.<ref name="carby"/>

Her novel "Iola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted" (1892), published when she was sixty-seven, addressed slavery and its aftermath through fiction that combined the conventions of the era's popular novels with her lifelong concerns. The novel's mixed-race heroine, who chooses identification with Black America despite opportunities her complexion might have provided, reflected themes that Reconstruction's failures made urgent. Her Philadelphia publication and residence connected one of African American literature's significant early novels to the city where she had based her career.<ref name="boyd"/>