She isn’t accepted by the Whites and mostly has to hide her white heritage from the Black people around her. The mother is Danish, the father Afro-American. What would it be like if you were constantly aware of the color of your skin? If what you look like is more defining than who you are? For Helga this is doubly tragic as she is, like Nella Larsen herself, of mixed origins. Quicksand explores different themes, the most important are race and gender. Helga Crane, the main character, is one of the most interesting heroines I’ve come across recently. It has so much to offer and reminded me at times of the novels of Elizabeth Taylor which is high praise.

It was never really established when she died, she went under many different names and she fabricated stories around her biography which obscured the facts. A lot – like in Zora Neale Hurston’s case – isn’t clear. Before she started writing she was a nurse, later became a librarian and after she stopped writing, worked as a nurse again during the last 30 years of her life. This may or may not have been the reason, it isn’t exactly clear. After an unsavoury accusation of plagiarism concerning her last short story, she stopped writing. She wrote only two novels, Quicksand and Passing (which I will review later) and three short stories.

These mixed origins are reflected in her work.

Nella was born to a Danish mother and a West Indian father. Nella Larsen is, like Zora Neale Hurston, and some other African-American writers, a mystery. I discovered Nella Larsen just recently while compiling books for different reading projects I have started, one of them being dedicated to African-American writers.

The foreword states that if we don’t call Jane Toomer’s Cane a novel then the most accomplished novel of the Harlem Renaissance movement would be Nella Larsen’s Quicksand. Moving to Harlem and eventually to Denmark, she attempts to carve out a comfortable life and place for herself, but ends up back where she started, choosing emotional freedom that quickly translates into a narrow existence. As a young woman, Helga teaches at an all-black school in the South, but even here she feels different. Born to a white mother and an absent black father, and despised for her dark skin, Helga Crane has long had to fend for herself.

Quicksand larsen novel