Since the eighteenth-century sermons of Maria W. Stewart and the nineteenth-century preaching of Sojourner Truth, African American women have connected social activism with Christianity. The novelist Emma Dunham Kelley is both an heir to and an innovator of this lineage. She introduces dominant themes of conversion, piety, and faith to an African American woman's novel tradition that had been largely characterized by post-Reconstruction themes of sociopolitical progress and race. Her characters combine both middle-class and nationalist-feminist roles and aspirations, in a style that anticipates the early-twentieth-century fictions of manners by African American authors such as Charles Waddell Chesnutt, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Jessie Redmon Fauset, and Nella Larsen.

Details of Kelley's life are sketchy. The dedicatory page of Megda (1891) indicates that her mother had been widowed. Beyond that fact, little is known. The important collective biographies of late-nineteenth-century African American women, such as Hallie Q. Brown's Homespun Heroines and Other...