"Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825-1911) was the most important and the most popular black feminist abolitionist writer and activist of the nineteenth century. A Brighter Day Coming, the most comprehensive collection of her works, includes all the poems from Harper's extant original volumes, plus many that have never been collected and one that was discovered in manuscript; speeches; and a selection of prose, including excerpts from the novel Iola Leroy and the serialized novel Fancy Etchings, and a generous group of letters ..."--Back cover.

This 1892 work was among the first novels published by an African-American woman. Its striking portrait of life during the Civil War and Reconstruction recounts a mixed-race woman's devotion to uplifting the black community.

Frances Harper was renowned in her lifetime not only as an activist who rallied on behalf of blacks, women, and the poor, but as a pioneer of the tradition of 'protest' literature, whose immense popularity did much to develop an audience for poetry in America. This collection of her poems is drawn from ten volumes published between 1854 and 1901. Their main issues are oppression, Christianity, and social and moral reform. Consolidating the oral tradition and the ballad form, and merging dramatic details and imagery with a strong political and racial awareness, Harper's poetry represented a distinctly Afro-American discourse that was to inspire generations of black writers.

In this important study, poet Melba Joyce Boyd analyzes Harper not simply as a feminist and an activist, but as a writer.

Winner of the College Language Association Book Award Frances Smith Foster has rediscovered three novels by Frances E. W. Harper, the best-known African-American writer of the nineteenth century and author of the classic Iola Leroy. Originally serialized in issues of The Christian Recorder between 1868 and 1888, these works address issues of passing, social responsibility, courtship, sexuality, and temperance, and are the first to have been written specifically for an African-American audience.