Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Minnie's Sacrifice

Terry Novak (Johnson and Wales University)

Ed. by Emory Elliott, University of California, Riverside
The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 3.2.2: American (US) Writing and Culture: The Nineteenth Century, 1783-1900.
Vol. editors: J. Michael Duvall (College of Charleston), Emory Elliott (University of California, Riverside), Nicole Kennedy (University of Newcastle), Stephen E. Meats (Pittsburg State University), Tony Papanikolas (San Jose State University), Sean Seeger (University of Essex)

Domains

Political Science

Dates

First circulation or publication 1868

Places

United States (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Non-fictional prose
Novel
Sentimental

Resources

Minnie's Sacrifice, Sowing and Reaping, and Trial and Triumph represent a significant boon to African-American literary studies in general and to the canon of Frances E. W. Harper specifically. The three novels were only recently re-discovered, in the early 1990's, by literary scholar Frances Smith Foster. Previous to this time, it was the assumption of the literary world that Harper's only novel was Iola Leroy. Through a great deal of literary detective work, Foster discovered the three missing novels, which had originally been serialized in The Christian Recorder, a vehicle of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church which had also published several of Harper's essays, short stories, and poems. Each of the three novels deals with the social issues of the day that were most pressing to Harper, a prominent social activist of her time....

Please log in to consult the article in its entirety. If you are a member (student of staff) of a subscribing institution (see List), you should be able to access the LE on campus directly (without the need to log in), and off-campus either via the institutional log in we offer, or via your institution's remote access facilities, or by creating a personal user account with your institutional email address. If you are not a member of a subscribing institution, you will need to purchase a personal subscription. For more information on how to subscribe as an individual user, please see under Individual Subcriptions.

764 words

Citation: Novak, Terry. "Minnie's Sacrifice". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 16 July 2002 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=10171, accessed 05 December 2025.]