Emma Dunham Kelley
Emma Dunham Kelley was a notable figure among African American women writers in the late nineteenth century, recognized for her contributions as one of the earliest African American women novelists. Her seminal works, particularly *Megda* (1891) and *Four Girls at Cottage City* (1895), primarily explore themes of religious awakening rather than the racial issues often tackled by her contemporaries. Kelley's identity has been the subject of considerable speculation; while long assumed to be African American, recent research suggests that she may have been of white descent, raising questions about her classification within the literary canon of African American writers. Her novels do not explicitly identify the race of their characters, which adds to the ambiguity surrounding her legacy. Despite her initial recognition and inclusion in prominent literary collections, like Henry Louis Gates's *The Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers*, her place in history has become contentious due to new findings regarding her racial background. As scholars continue to examine her life and works, Kelley's story reflects the complexities of identity and representation within the literary landscape.
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Emma Dunham Kelley
- Born: November 11, 1863
- Birthplace: Dennis, Massachusetts
- Died: October 22, 1938
- Place of death: Rumford, Rhode Island
Biography
Emma Dunham Kelley has always been an enigma among African America women writers of the nineteenth century; recently she has become controversial as well. Long studied as one of the first African American women novelists, everything known about her was derived as conjecture from the settings and content material from her novels. Her dedication of her sentimental novel of young ladies eschewing romance for religious awakening and dedication, Megda (1891), more or less indicated that her mother had been widowed. Her second novel, Four Girls at Cottage City, published in 1895, listed the author as Emma Kelley-Hawkins; therefore it has been surmised that Kelley married between 1891 and 1895. Due to the settings of the novels, critics have long assumed that she came from the Cape Cod region of Massachusetts. Her identification as an African American women seems to have largely come from the picture of her included as a frontispiece in an early edition of Megda.
Oddly, however, other biographies and histories of important African American women of the nineteenth century and of African American writers of the nineteenth century fail to mention Kelley. Furthermore, the races of her characters in her novels are ambiguous; at no point does she actually indicate that her characters are black, nor does she focus on the kinds of themes that contemporary African American writers typically considered, such as racism, the legacy of slavery, the class system, and so on. Instead, Kelley seemed instead interested in writing sentimental stories of growth in religious faith. Nevertheless, Kelley was included in Henry Louis Gates’s important series The Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers.
In February of 2005, however, a Brandeis graduate student named Holly Jackson wrote in the Boston Globe that previous conjectures about Kelley’s race may, in fact, have been incorrect. Jackson consulted the Massachusetts Vital Records directory and found that a white woman named Emma D. Kelley had been born in Dennis on Cape Cod in 1863. Due to the listing of Kelley’s race, Jackson assumed that she had the wrong woman and did not pursue the matter initially. Upon learning from a rare books librarian at Brown University that he knew of a Megda Hawkins who had attended his church, Jackson searched for her obituary and found that Medga Hawkins was the daughter of Emma D. and Benjamin A. Hawkins. Jackson then began consulting other records, such as the census, obituaries, and marriage records. She found, to her surprise, that every member of her extended family was listed on all official documents as white. Jackson went on to note that even the black and white photo of Kelley that had caused some scholars to assume she was African American was racially indeterminate. Although Jackson’s discovery has not been uncontested, it does appear to be conclusive, and consequently Kelley’s place in the canon among African American writers is currently in question.