The Complete Frances Harper -- Frances Ellen Watkins Harper

<p><i>The Complete Frances Harper</i> (2021) is a collection of writing by Frances Ellen Watkins Harper. Harper, the first African American woman to publish a novel, gained a reputation as a popular poet and impassioned abolitionist in the decades leading up to the American Civil War. Much of her work was rediscovered in the twentieth century and preserved for its significance to some of the leading social movements of the nineteenth century, including temperance, abolition, and women's suffrage. As an artist for whom the personal was always political, Frances Harper served in a leadership role at the Women's Christian Temperance Union and worked to establish the National Association of Colored Women, serving for a time as vice president of the organization. Included in this volume are her early poetry volumes, such as Forest Leaves (1845) and <i>Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects</i> (1854). In "Bury Me in Free Land," an influential poem published in an 1858 edition of abolitionist newspaper <i>The Anti-Slavery Bugle</i>, Harper expresses her commitment to the cause of freedom in life or death terms: "I ask no monument, proud and high, / To arrest the gaze of the passers-by; / All that my yearning spirit craves, / Is bury me not in a land of slaves." She reflects on the theme of freedom throughout her body of work, often examining her own identity or experiences as a free Black woman alongside the lives of her enslaved countrymen. <i>The Complete Frances Harper</i> also includ