Nella Larsen (1891–1964) was born in Chicago to a Danish mother and a West Indian father. She trained as a nurse at Lincoln Hospital in New York, worked as a nurse and then as a librarian, and became a prominent figure of the Harlem Renaissance with the novels Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929). In 1930 she became the first African American woman to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship. After a plagiarism controversy over a short story and a painful divorce she stopped publishing, and spent her final decades working again as a nurse in New York.
Passing is a short novel in three parts, told in close third person through the consciousness of Irene Redfield, a light-skinned Black woman married to a Harlem physician. It opens with a letter that stirs Irene's memory of an encounter two years earlier.
