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, a year after her debut Quicksand — making her one of the very few Black women of the Harlem Renaissance to publish two novels in succession. Quicksand had won the Harmon Foundation's bronze medal; Passing was praised by W. E. B. Du Bois for its psychological compression. A Guggenheim Fellowship followed in 1930, the first awarded to a Black woman. A plagiarism accusation over a published story ended her career in fiction. She returned to nursing, working New York hospitals until her death in Brooklyn in 1964, largely forgotten.
Passing operates on several registers at once: a novel about racial passing in 1920s America, about Harlem's Black professional class and its fragile securities, about the negotiated silences of marriage, and — most pressingly for later critics — about a desire between its two central women that the text encodes everywhere and names nowhere. Its silences are as loaded as its dialogue, and its decisive final event remains, after a century of criticism, genuinely unresolved.
The Prohibition
Larsen was born in Chicago in 1891 to a Danish immigrant mother and a mixed-race father who disappeared early. Her mother remarried a white Dane, and Larsen grew up the single dark child in an otherwise white family — classified as Black by law, experienced as discordant by her stepfamily, at home in neither world. By the time she settled in Harlem as a nurse and then a librarian, she had assembled overlapping identities — Black, Scandinavian, professional, married — none of which felt solid.
The prohibition she faced was institutional and racial. American publishing in the 1920s had a narrow appetite for Black writing: folk life, urban realism, uplift. A novel centred on a light-skinned Black woman's interior life, given modernist formal attention and encoding erotic ambiguity between two married Black women, fit none of those slots. Homosexuality was criminalised, medicalised as pathology, and unspeakable in the respectable professional world Larsen inhabited. She did not name the desire. She built a novel in which every gesture vibrates with what could not be said.
The Strategy
Larsen's primary strategy was encoded suggestion. She built a novel whose conventional surface — jealousy, social anxiety, moral concern between married women — served as cover for what was not being said. When Irene watches Clare, the prose lingers in a register not quite equal to the disapproval it claims. When Clare writes seeking re-entry into Harlem social life, the letters read like courtship. The subtext shows only to readers prepared to see it.
The second strategy was formal economy. Passing is a short novel in which every scene does several kinds of work. Larsen had read James and Wharton carefully, and modelled her prose on a standard her Harlem Renaissance contemporaries were not all attempting.
The third was the unreliable narrator. Irene's focalisation is close enough that readers risk accepting her judgements as the novel's, missing the moments when her self-deceptions show. Irene believes she is concerned for Clare; the text reveals she is also jealous of Clare's freedom. Larsen stages repression from inside the repressed consciousness, with no authoritative voice to say what to think.
The Price and the Legacy
The price was comprehensive. The 1930 plagiarism charge over a story in Forum magazine was impossible for Larsen to answer convincingly; her published defence did not persuade, and her reputation did not recover. She travelled in Europe on her Guggenheim and attempted a third novel she could not finish. Back in New York she discovered her husband, the physicist Elmer Imes, conducting an affair; they divorced in 1933. She returned to nursing — night shifts at Gouverneur Hospital, then Metropolitan — and colleagues appear not to have known their ward nurse had written two novels praised by Du Bois. She died in her Brooklyn apartment on 30 March 1964; biographers took decades to locate her grave.
The posthumous recovery began with Mary Helen Washington's feminist recuperation in the 1970s, gathered force through Deborah E. McDowell's queer-theoretical readings, and is now fully canonical. Passing is taught across American literature, African American studies, and modernism courses, and was adapted into a film by Rebecca Hall in 2021. She wrote two novels, was destroyed, and both 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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