Nella Larsen (born Nellie Walker) was an American novelist, nurse, and librarian. She published two novels—Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929)—and a few short stories.
A revival of interest in her writing has occurred since the late 20th century. Her works have been the subjects of numerous academic studies involving issues of racial and sexual identity, and she has been lauded as "not only the premier novelist of the Harlem Renaissance, but also an important figure in American modernism."
Nella Larsen was born Nellie Walker, in a poor district of south Chicago known as the Levee, on April 13, 1891 (though Larsen would frequently claim to have been born in 1893). Her mother was Pederline Marie Hansen, an ethnically Danish immigrant, born in 1868 in Bernstorfsminde, a small hamlet in the parish of Brahetrolleborg. Migrating to the USA around 1886 and going by the name Mary, Larsen's mother worked as a seamstress and domestic worker in Chicago.
Larsen's father was Peter Walker, a "colored" immigrant from the Danish West Indies (now the U.S. Virgin Islands). Walker and Hansen filed an application for a marriage license in 1891, indicating a clear intent to marry around the time Nella Larsen was born. Despite the application, an actual license or record of the ceremony has not been found in historical archives. Walker was probably a descendant on his paternal side of Henry or George Walker, white men from Albany, New York, who were known to have settled in the Danish West Indies in about 1840. In the Danish West Indies, the law did not recognise racial difference, and racial lines were more fluid than in the former slave states of the United States. Walker may never have identified as "Negro." He abandoned the family within a year of Nella's birth. Following his disappearance, he effectively vanished from the historical record. She said he had died when she was very young. At this time, Chicago was filled with immigrants, but the Great Migration of Black people from the South had not begun. Near the end of Walker's childhood, the Black population of the city was 1.3% in 1890 and 2% in 1910.
Larsen's mother then married Peter Larsen (A.K.A. Larson, b. 1867), a fellow Danish immigrant, in November 1898—six years after the birth of their first daughter together and seven years after the disappearance of Peter Walker. Some have hypothesized that Larsen’s biological father and her stepfather were actually the same man "passing" for white, while others have argued that they were two distinct individuals. In 1892 the couple had a daughter, Anna Elizabeth, also known as Lizzie (married name Gardner). Nellie took her stepfather's surname, sometimes using versions spelled Nellye Larson and Nellie Larsen, before settling finally on Nella Larsen. The mixed family moved to a mostly white neighborhood of German and Scandinavian immigrants on the South Side of Chicago, but encountered discrimination because of Nella.
The American author and critic Darryl Pinckney wrote of her anomalous situation:
as a member of a white immigrant family, she [Larsen] had no entrée into the world of the blues or of the black church. If she could never be white like her mother and sister, neither could she ever be black in quite the same way that Langston Hughes and his characters were black. Hers was a netherworld, unrecognizable historically and too painful to dredge up.
From 1895 to 1898, Larsen lived in Denmark with her mother and her half-sister. During this time, she lived in a provincial setting—likely the hamlet of Askov in Jutland. Her grandmother, Karen Mandrupsen Hansen, died in October 1897 while she was there. Though she was unusual in Denmark because of being of mixed race, she had some good memories from that time, including playing Danish children’s games, which she later wrote about in English. After returning to Chicago, she attended Wendell Phillips High School, a large public school, from 1905-7. At the same time as the migration of Southern blacks increased to the city, so had European immigration. Racial segregation and tensions had increased in the immigrant neighborhoods, where both groups competed for jobs and housing.
In 1907, the family moved to a neighborhood near the Chicago Normal School, though Nella never attended that school, instead being sent to the Fisk University Normal School in Nashville around 1907. Her mother believed that education could give her an opportunity and supported her in attending Fisk, a historically black university. At Fisk, Larsen was living within an African-American community for the first time, but she was still separated by her own background and life experiences from most of the students, who were primarily from the South, with most descended from former slaves. Professor George B. Hutchinson established that Larsen was expelled, along with ten other women, inferring that this was for some violation of Fisk's strict dress or conduct codes for women. Larsen went on her own to Denmark, where she lived for a total of three years, between 1909 and 1912, and attended the University of Copenhagen, though she did not formally enroll as a regular student.
In 1912, Larsen enrolled in the nursing school at New York City's Lincoln Hospital and Nursing Home, an institution that was founded in the 19th century in Manhattan as a nursing home to serve black people, whose hospital services had grown in importance. The total operation had been relocated to a newly constructed campus in the South Bronx. At the time, the hospital patients were primarily white; the nursing home patients were primarily black; the doctors were white males; and the nurses and nursing students were black females.
Upon graduating from nursing training school in 1915, Larsen went South to work at the Tuskegee Institute in Tuskegee, Alabama, where she soon became head nurse at its John A. Andrew Memorial Hospital and training school. While at Tuskegee, she was introduced to Booker T. Washington's model of education and became disillusioned with it. As it was combined with poor working conditions for nurses at Tuskegee, Larsen decided to leave after a year or so.
She returned to New York in 1916, where she worked for two years as a nurse at Lincoln Hospital. After earning the second-highest score on a civil service exam, Larsen was hired by the city Bureau of Public Health as a nurse. She worked for them in the Bronx through the 1918 flu pandemic, in "mostly white neighborhoods" and with white colleagues. Afterwards she continued with the city as a nurse.
In 1919, Larsen married Elmer Imes, a prominent physicist; he was the second African American to earn a PhD in physics. After her marriage, she sometimes used the name Nella Larsen Imes in her writing. A year after her marriage, she published her first short stories.
The couple moved to Harlem in the 1920s, where their marriage and life together had contradictions of class. As Pinckney writes:
By virtue of her marriage, she was a member of Harlem's black professional class, many of them people of color with partially European ancestry. She and her husband knew the NAACP leadership: W.E.B. Du Bois, Walter White, James Weldon Johnson. However, because of her low birth and mixed parentage, and because she did not have a college degree, Larsen was alienated from the black middle class, whose members emphasized college and family ties, and black fraternities and sororities.
Her mixed racial ancestry was not itself unusual in the black middle class. But many of these individuals, such as Langston Hughes, had more distant European ancestors. He and others formed an elite of mixed race or people of color, some of whom had ancestors who had been free people of color well before the American Civil War. This had given many families an advantage in establishing themselves and gaining educations in the North. In the 1920s, most African Americans in Harlem were exploring and emphasizing their black heritage.
Imes's scientific studies and achievement placed him in a different class than Larsen. The Imes couple had difficulties by the late 1920s, when he had an affair with a white woman at Fisk University, where he was a professor. Imes and Larsen would divorce in 1933.