[There is] far more to Jessie Fauset than melodrama, romance, conventionality, and middle-class material…. A deep pain and anger affect both the form and content of her novels. They are not at all as conventional as they have appeared. Except for her rambling first novel, all her books have a double structure. On the surface they read as conventional middle-class love stories with happy endings; underneath these developing romances, though, lies a counterstructure which expresses either the souring of childhood hopes, or a near-tragedy, or sardonic comedy. Each counterstructure complicates, shadows, and darkens the love story.

In content and tone, too, a similar ambivalence prevails. On one hand there is happiness and self-confidence…. But life in Miss Fauset's novels is not always so romantic: sisters are estranged through skin color, scholarships are unfairly withdrawn, a darkskinned teenager kills himself. Just as there are two structures in Miss Fauset's...