Title: Passing Author: Nella Larsen Creation Date: 1929 Location: United States Collection: Women Who Wrote When They Weren't Supposed To
Brief
Nella Larsen published Passing in April 1929 with Alfred A. Knopf, the year after her debut Quicksand (1928), making her one of the very few Black women writers of the Harlem Renaissance to publish two novels in quick succession. Quicksand had won the Harmon Foundation's bronze medal for literature; Passing was praised on publication for its psychological acuity by critics including W. E. B. Du Bois, who admired its compression and its refusal of racial sentimentality. A Guggenheim Fellowship followed in 1930 — the first awarded to a Black woman — and Larsen used it to travel in Europe and to begin a third novel. Then a short story she had published in Forum magazine, "Sanctuary," was accused in that magazine's letters pages of being derived too closely from a story by the British writer Sheila Kaye-Smith. The charge, whatever its actual validity, effectively ended her publishing career. She never published fiction again. She returned to nursing, a profession she had practised in her twenties, and worked in New York City hospitals for the rest of her life, dying alone in her Brooklyn apartment in March 1964 at the age of seventy-two, largely forgotten. The posthumous recovery of her work began in the 1970s with feminist and Black-studies scholarship and has not stopped since.
Passing operates on multiple registers at the same time. It is a novel about racial passing as a social practice in 1920s America; about the architecture of Harlem's Black professional class and the fragile security it had constructed for itself; about marriage and the negotiated silences within it; and — most pressingly for later critics — about a desire between the two central women that the text encodes everywhere and names nowhere. The novel is taut to the point of vibration. Its silences are as loaded as its dialogue. Its narrative perspective is so carefully managed that the book's decisive event remains, after multiple readings and a century of criticism, genuinely unresolved.
The thematic core is the danger of transgression — racial, sexual, social — and the violence with which transgressive figures are contained or eliminated by the very communities that fear what they represent. Irene Redfield, the focalising consciousness, is herself passing in the very first chapter, light enough to take tea on the whites-only rooftop of a Chicago hotel, without admitting to herself that this is what she is doing. The whole novel operates in this key of strategic self-deception, and Larsen's formal achievement is making the reader complicit in Irene's refusals without letting the reader off the hook for them.
The Prohibition
Larsen was born Nellie Walker in Chicago in 1891, the daughter of a Danish immigrant mother and a mixed-race father of Afro-Caribbean descent who disappeared from her life early. Her mother remarried a white Danish labourer, and Nella grew up as the single dark child in an otherwise white family — classified by the American racial system as Black, experienced by her own stepfamily as a discordant presence, never quite at home in either the Scandinavian-American world of her household or the Black American world she was assigned to by the law. She was sent at sixteen to the Fisk Normal School in Nashville and later spent time in Denmark with her mother's relatives. By the time she settled in Harlem in the 1910s as a trained nurse and then as a librarian at the 135th Street branch of the New York Public Library, she had constructed for herself a set of overlapping identities — Black, Scandinavian, professional, married — none of which felt entirely solid and all of which could be revised under pressure.
The prohibition she faced as a writer was institutional, ideological, and racial at once. American publishing in the 1920s was an overwhelmingly white enterprise that had recently developed a small, bounded appetite for Black writing as an exotic commodity. The Harlem Renaissance had produced a moment in which Black writers could publish with major houses — Knopf, Harper, Harcourt — but only within a narrow set of acceptable registers. The expected Black novel of the late 1920s was either a study of rural folk life, a gritty urban realism in the Van Vechten mode, or a racial uplift narrative demonstrating that Black Americans were as respectable as white ones. A book that took the interior life of a light-skinned Black middle-class woman as its subject, gave that subject modernist formal attention, and encoded erotic ambiguity between its two Black women characters fit none of the slots the market had opened.
The more specific prohibition concerned same-sex desire. Homosexuality was criminalised across the United States in 1929, was medicalised as pathology in the psychiatric literature of the period, and was socially unspeakable in the Black professional class Larsen belonged to and was writing about. Harlem itself had a thriving queer underworld — the rent parties, the drag balls at the Hamilton Lodge, the blues women singing lyrics that meant what everyone knew they meant — but this world was not continuous with the respectable professional class of doctors' wives and social-uplift committees in which Irene Redfield and, by proxy, Larsen herself moved. To name a desire between two Black married women in that world, in a book published by a mainstream New York press, would have been to break every rule the world had. Larsen did not name it. She built a novel in which every gesture, every look, every description of a throat or a hand vibrates with what she could not say.
The Strategy
Larsen's strategy was compression and encoded suggestion. She had seen what happened to writers who tried to name too much: Richard Bruce Nugent's 1926 story "Smoke, Lilies, and Jade" in Fire!! had been explicit about same-sex desire and had been largely ignored. She chose instead to write a novel whose surface was impeccably readable as a conventional drama and whose subsurface was organised by what was not being said. The central relationship between Irene and Clare is presented through the language of competition, jealousy, social anxiety, and moral concern — all the emotions the period considered proper between two married women — while the prose, at the level of the sentence, keeps registering a different set of feelings that the characters themselves will not name. When Irene watches Clare across a room, the description lingers on physical detail in a register that is not quite the register of disapproval it claims to be. When Clare writes to Irene begging to be let back into Harlem social life, the letters have the temperature of courtship. The strategy was to keep the conventional plot absolutely solid as cover and to let the unconventional subtext show only to readers prepared to see it.
The second element of her strategy was formal economy. Passing is a very short novel — under two hundred pages in most editions — and every scene does more than one kind of work. The opening Chicago hotel sequence establishes the setting, introduces both women, demonstrates that Irene passes without thinking of it as passing, presents John Bellew's racism in a form that will detonate later, and plants every thematic seed the novel will develop. Larsen had read Henry James and Edith Wharton carefully, knew what compressed point-of-view fiction could do, and modelled her sentences on a standard her Harlem Renaissance contemporaries were not all trying to meet.
The third strategy was the unreliable narrator, though the term would not quite have been used in 1929. Irene's focalisation is so close to the reader that the reader almost takes her judgements as the novel's judgements, and almost misses the moments when Larsen has let Irene's self-deceptions show. Irene thinks she is concerned for Clare's safety; she is also, the text allows us to see, jealous of Clare's ability to move freely across the boundaries Irene has chosen to respect. Irene thinks she is protecting her marriage; she is also protecting a version of herself that her marriage requires. The strategy lets Larsen stage the psychological reality of repression from inside the repressed consciousness, without ever handing the reader an authoritative voice that would tell her what to think.
The Price and the Legacy
The price was comprehensive and final. The plagiarism charge over "Sanctuary" in 1930 was sharp, embarrassing, and impossible for Larsen to answer convincingly — her defence, a published note in Forum explaining the similarities as a coincidence arising from her nursing experience, did not persuade her critics and left her reputation permanently damaged. She used her Guggenheim money to travel in Europe, worked sporadically on a third novel she could not finish, discovered on her return to New York that her husband, the physicist Elmer Imes, was conducting an affair with a white woman at Fisk University, divorced him in 1933 after a painful public proceeding, and then withdrew from literature altogether. She returned to nursing, working the night shift at Gouverneur Hospital on the Lower East Side and then at Metropolitan Hospital for the rest of her career. Colleagues in those hospitals appear not to have known that the quiet nurse in charge of the ward was the author of two novels once praised by Du Bois. She died in her Brooklyn apartment on 30 March 1964 and was buried in a grave that took her biographers decades to locate.
The price has become, in a way, part of the text. The silencing of Larsen is discussed in every serious critical treatment of Passing because the novel itself is so deeply about silencing — about the costs of not being able to say what one means, about the violence that attends transgressive figures, about the specific vulnerability of a Black woman writer whose precarious standing can be annihilated by a single accusation. The fact that the author of a book this technically controlled was herself effectively eliminated from American letters by the same society whose prohibitions the book was about is now read as the novel's outer ring.
The legacy, posthumous and considerable, began with Mary Helen Washington's recovery work and the broader feminist recuperation of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1970s and 1980s, gathered force through Deborah E. McDowell's queer-theoretical readings in the 1980s and 1990s, and is now fully installed in the canon. Passing is taught in American literature, African American studies, women's and gender studies, and modernism courses across the Anglophone university system. It was adapted into a well-received film by Rebecca Hall in 2021. Scholarly biographies — Thadious M. Davis's Nella Larsen, Novelist of the Harlem Renaissance (1994) and George Hutchinson's In Search of Nella Larsen (2006) — and hundreds of journal articles have accumulated around a novel whose author published nothing for the last thirty-four years of her life. She wrote two novels and a short story, was destroyed, and the two novels now sit in the canon.
The Reading
The novel begins with a letter. Irene Redfield, a Black woman living in Harlem with her physician husband Brian and their two sons, receives an envelope that she recognises at once as something she would rather not have. The handwriting belongs to Clare Kendry, a childhood acquaintance from Chicago she has not seen in twelve years, and the mere sight of it calls up a memory Irene has been storing away. Two summers earlier, on a trip to Chicago to visit her father, Irene had gone — exhausted by the heat, light-skinned enough to do it without incident — to the rooftop restaurant of the Drayton Hotel, a white establishment. While she was having tea, a beautiful woman across the room kept looking at her in a way she could not quite account for, and she grew afraid that she had been recognised as Black and was about to be asked to leave. The woman was Clare, who had also been passing, and who had recognised Irene not as a Black woman in a white space but as the childhood friend she had lost touch with when her father died and she had been taken in by white relatives. Clare came over to Irene's table, and the two women had tea together.
At that tea, Clare introduced Irene to her husband, a white man named John Bellew, who came up to their table toward the end of the afternoon. Bellew made a show of his racism in front of both women, calling Clare by the private nickname "Nig" — a reference, he explained with a laugh, to how much darker she seemed to be getting as the years passed, which was a joke he told as a joke and did not know was about everything. The scene is Larsen at her most compressed. In fewer than ten pages she establishes Irene's position (she can pass but mostly chooses not to, reserving it for strategic moments she does not admit to herself are strategic), Clare's position (she has passed completely, married a virulently racist white man, borne him a daughter, and now appears to have no path back to the world she came from), and the social reality that Clare is living inside a marriage built on her husband's fundamental misreading of who she is — a marriage in which discovery would be catastrophic not merely for her social standing but for her physical safety, because Bellew is the kind of man who would not stop at a divorce. Irene leaves the hotel shaken by the encounter, writes Clare a note declining further contact, and tries, with the discipline she has made the foundation of her character, to forget the whole thing.
Clare does not allow the forgetting. The letter that arrives two summers later is a plea: she is back in New York, she wants to see Irene, she wants — she does not quite say, but the whole tone of the letter is saying — to come back. Irene is resistant and knows she has reason to be. A woman who has passed for twelve years, married into a white racist household, and then begun to reach for the Black social world she left behind is a woman creating risk for everyone she touches. If Bellew discovers his wife's ancestry, the wreckage will not be confined to Clare. Irene's husband Brian is a respected Harlem physician; Irene's social position depends on a stability she has worked hard to construct; the Black Harlem middle class of the late 1920s is a small world in which exposure travels quickly. These are the reasons Irene gives herself for refusing Clare, and they are good reasons as far as they go. They are not, the novel lets the reader begin to sense, the whole reason.
Clare comes anyway. She presents herself at Irene's Harlem house, unannounced, beautiful, unapologetic, and so physically present that Irene cannot quite look away from her. The descriptions Larsen gives of Clare in these scenes operate in a register that the rest of the novel's social realism does not prepare the reader for: Clare's throat, Clare's skin, the turn of Clare's head, the particular quality of Clare's laugh. These descriptions are filtered through Irene's consciousness and are ostensibly the registering of a threat or an annoyance, but the sentences do not feel like registrations of threat. They feel like something else, and the something else is what the novel's later readers have given most of their attention to. Irene capitulates in stages. Clare attends a charity dance at the Negro Welfare League. Clare goes with Irene to tea parties. Clare, in a scene that the novel presents with forensic care, sits in Irene's drawing room laughing with Brian and the children, belonging in a room Irene has built to contain her own life and no one else's. Clare is electric, reckless, hungry — the word the novel keeps coming back to is having, as though Clare has been starving for years and can only now eat.
The novel's middle section builds the pressure between the two women and the parallel pressure in Irene's marriage. Brian Redfield has been unhappy for a long time, and his unhappiness has a specific shape: he has wanted for years to leave the United States, to take the family to Brazil, where he believes the racial situation would allow him and his sons to live without the daily grinding he experiences as an American Black man. Irene has prevented the move. She has argued that his practice is here, that the boys' schooling is here, that their social world is here, and the arguments are plausible but not, to Brian, sufficient. He has stayed because she has insisted, and the staying has cost him. Larsen gives the reader Brian's unhappiness through Irene's eyes, which means the reader sees it in flattened and managed form — Irene is not willing to look at Brian's unhappiness directly, because looking at it would require her to acknowledge that she is responsible for it and that the responsibility is a form of control she has been exercising without admitting to herself that she is exercising it. Irene's focalisation is, throughout this section, a study in the mechanisms of self-protective refusal.
Into this marriage Clare arrives, and Irene becomes convinced, as the weeks and months proceed, that Brian and Clare are having an affair. The novel does not give the reader a confirmation. There is no scene in which the affair is directly shown, no admission from either party, no physical evidence that Irene or the reader can point to. There is only Irene's growing certainty, her interpretation of a look at a breakfast table, a hand brushing another hand across a tea tray, a conversation that stops when Irene enters the room. Larsen leaves genuinely open the question of whether the affair is happening at all or whether Irene's certainty is a displacement — the desire she will not let herself acknowledge in her own feelings for Clare, redirected into a jealousy she is allowed to feel because jealousy over a husband is socially legible and desire between women is not. The ambiguity is not a mystery to be solved at the end of the novel. It is the novel's structural principle, the formal enactment of the psychological condition the book is about.
Bellew re-enters the story at the worst possible moment. Irene has been walking in the street with a Black woman friend and has chanced to meet Bellew, who raises his hat politely to her and, at the same moment, registers that the woman she is walking with is unambiguously Black. Bellew looks at Irene with a new attention and does not speak. Irene understands that he has understood something. The moment is given quickly, without emphasis, and its implications unfold only later. Bellew, having followed the implication to its end, has begun to suspect his wife. Before Clare can know that he suspects her, he acts.
The final sequence takes place at a sixth-floor Harlem apartment where Felise Freeland, a friend of Irene's, is hosting a small winter party. Clare is there. Irene is there. The atmosphere is convivial in the surface way Harlem parties in the novel are convivial. Irene is standing near Clare at an open window. The door to the apartment bursts open and Bellew comes in, having tracked his wife to the party, shouting — having understood in that moment not merely that Clare is Black but that the entire marriage, the whole twelve years of his life with her, has been a construction built to conceal from him exactly the thing he could not bear to know. The shock, the shame, the rage are all on his face, and what he shouts is the proof that he has understood: he calls her by the name he had once used as a joke, and now the name is an accusation. Clare stands at the open window. The next thing the reader knows is that Clare is gone from the window and is, a few lines later, dead on the pavement six storeys below.
What happened in the interval between Clare standing at the window and Clare lying on the pavement is the most discussed passage in American fiction of its decade. Larsen does not narrate it. The text goes dark for a moment — Irene's consciousness, through which everything has been focalised, refuses the moment or cannot hold it — and when the narration resumes, Clare is dead and Irene's memory of what she herself did in those seconds is unreliable, non-committal, self-protective in ways the reader has been taught by the whole novel to distrust. Did Clare jump, unable to face what Bellew had just understood and the ruin she saw opening below her? Did Clare fall, pushed backwards by the sheer force of the scene itself? Did Irene, standing beside her, put out a hand and push her? The text refuses to say. Irene's subsequent account to the other guests, to the police, to herself is perfunctory and evasive. She is not charged. The death is recorded as an accident or a suicide. The novel ends shortly after, with Irene back in her own house, her marriage in whatever state it is now in, the Redfield sons asleep upstairs, and the page on which the final sentence falls offering no resolution.
The question the ending poses is not merely whodunit. It is structural. Did Bellew's racism kill Clare? Did the social system that made passing both necessary and impossible kill Clare? Did Irene's desire, unacknowledged and redirected into something that could find an outlet in a single unwitnessed second at an open window, kill Clare? All three answers are true simultaneously, and the simultaneity is Larsen's point: the violent elimination of a transgressive woman like Clare Kendry is not the act of one individual but the operation of an entire world organised to prevent her from existing in the way she insists on existing. Bellew is the immediate cause and the least interesting one. The community that reads Clare's threat accurately and that contains other Clares by means less overt than defenestration is the larger subject, and Irene — the respectable Harlem doctor's wife who has built her whole life around the management of risk and has been undone by the appearance of a woman she cannot manage — is the figure through whom Larsen shows what that community costs its members.
Larsen's prose in the final sequence is so controlled that the control itself becomes the novel's last argument. A writer who can stage a death this ambiguous without once cheating the reader is a writer who knew exactly what she was doing, and the posthumous criticism has spent the better part of a century catching up to what was put on the page in 1929. The novel is eighty years old before it is finally read as it asked to be read, and the reading, when it comes, is conducted by scholars who have had to develop a critical vocabulary the 1920s did not possess in order to say plainly what Larsen had to say obliquely. That Passing survived the long silence its author was forced into, that it now teaches every new generation of American readers what it looked like for a Black woman writer of the interwar period to be this technically accomplished and this systematically constrained, is the novel's quiet, lasting victory — a victory its author did not live to see and that its heroines, in their different ways, did not survive to claim.
This post is part of Women Who Wrote When They Weren't Supposed To, a series on women writing against the constraints of their time. See the full collection →
The Penguin Classics edition by Thadious Davis — Larsen's foremost biographer — pairs the novel with a rich introduction grounding it in the Harlem Renaissance and Larsen's own life of overlapping identities. The Norton Critical Edition by Carla Kaplan adds contemporary reviews, biographical documents, and the critical essays that recovered the book from decades of silence.
Penguin's edition with a superb introduction by Larsen's leading biographer.
Norton's scholarly edition with contemporary reception, biographical context, and essential criticism.
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