I think that it is important to consider Nella Larsen's own life and how it may have influenced the stories that she told. She was mixed race and lived in the same space between black and white that her characters did. She grew up in a poor district of Chicago like Clare and Irene. Her mother was a Danish immigrant, and her father a Danish West Indies immigrant (possibly of mixed race too). Her father left (or died) when she was young. She lived with relatives in Denmark for a few years as a child too. It seems she felt that she didn't belong anywhere. I read one article that suggested there were members of her white family who denied her existence.
Wikipedia has a nice summary.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nella_Larsen
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The author and critic Darryl Pinckney wrote of her anomalous situation:
"as a member of a white immigrant family, she [Larsen] had no entrée into the world of the blues or of the black church. If she could never be white like her mother and sister, neither could she ever be black in quite the same way that Langston Hughes and his characters were black. Hers was a netherworld, unrecognizable historically and too painful to dredge up."
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She moved to Harlem in the 1920s after she married a prominent physicist.
Quote:
As Pinckney writes:
"By virtue of her marriage, she was a member of Harlem's black professional class. She and her husband knew the NAACP leadership: W.E.B. Du Bois, Walter White, James Weldon Johnson. However, because of her low birth and mixed parentage, and because she didn't have a college degree, Larsen was alienated from the life of the black middle class, with its emphasis on school and family ties, its fraternities and sororities.
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Both of her novels,
Quicksand and
Passing, feature mixed race women.
Her two novels brought her fame in the Harlem Renaissance. She was a rising star. However, she ultimately left literature, followed a career in nursing and eventually vanished in obscurity. The biographer George Hutchinson says that she remained in New York but avoided contact with her friends and past world. It wasn't until the 1990s that people began to study her forgotten works and take more interest in her life.