A review by emmkayt
Miss Anne in Harlem: The White Women of the Black Renaissance by Carla Kaplan

5.0

This was stellar! Well-researched and heavily end-noted, but also smoothly written and engaging. Kaplan’s interest is white women who chose to participate in the Harlem Renaissance, and her focus is on a half dozen of them in particular. They’re a really interesting bunch. Josephine Cogdell Schuyler, for example, had quite a life, from small town Texan wealth to bohemian San Francisco to marriage to a prominent black journalist. Lillian Wood, long believed to have been a black novelist, turns out to have been an older white teacher at a black college in Tennessee. And Nancy Cunard was quite something - a wealthy, headstrong Englishwoman determined to shed her background in solidarity with black Americans. Kaplan doesn’t merely bring attention to her subjects’ lives, fascinating as that would be. She draws on their stories to sensitively illuminate the contradictions of identity and race, and the complexities of their time. Really, really good.