Chaste in language, moral in character, and fiery in spirit, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825-1911), poet, novelist, essayist, journalist, abolitionist, feminist, Christian writer, and temperance and women's rights organizer, was truly a 19th century Rennaisance woman of letters. Born on September 24, 1825, to a free black woman and unknown father, Frances poignantly wrote 34 years later, "Oh, is it not a privilege, if you are sisterless and lonely, to be a sister to the human race, and to place your heart where it may throb close to downtrodden humanity." Filled with courage, compassion, danger, difficulty and intelligence, her life and work shine light on that period of American history after the Civil War which so cruelly combined progress and goodness, racist backsliding and fear.

In an era where it was deemed unseemly, if not shocking, for an unmarried, young woman, black or white, to address mixed audiences of men and women, the Maine Antislavery Society helped launch a lifelong career, when, in 1854, they hired Frances Ellen Watkins, at age 29, to speak on their behalf. A radical antebellum abolitionist, Miss Watkins preached and practiced the politics of Free Produce, urging economic boycotts of slave-produced goods. Denied appointment as an agent because of obdurate sexism, Frances Watkins, nevertheless, collected donations for the Underground Railroad and counted among her friends Frederick Douglass, William Still, John Brown, Sojourner Truth, and Harriet Tubman. After the abolition of slavery, she was especially concerned with helping women understand they could and should use their time and talents to achieve "high and lofty goals."

She married in November 1860 a widower Fenton Harper by whom she had a child, Mary. Four years later, upon the death of her husband, and unprotected by civil law, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper needed to make a living to support her daughter and herself. She resumed her writing in grueling speaking tours in the South dedicated to suffrage, women's education, and particularly the welfare and elevation of newly freed black women. In the 1890s she gained a national reputation for her brilliant speeches and organizing for the Women's Christian Temperance Union and the National Assocation of Colored Women.

Long recognized as the most popular black poet prior to Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Mrs. Harper also wrote Iola Leroy (1892), probably the best-known and most reprinted African American novel published before Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937). Similar to Charles Dickens and Balzac, Mrs. Harper's three other novels Minnie's Sacrifice (1869), Sowing and Reaping (1876-77), and Trial and Triumph (1888-89), were published in serial form, in Mrs. Harper's case, by The Christian Recorder, the bimonthly magazine of the African Methodist Episcopal (A.M.E.) Church. Entertaining, provocative, and a joy to read, Mrs. Harper grabs readers from the first moment. The main characters are "true men and true women" who "make every gift, whether gold or talent, fortune or genius, subserve the cause of crushed humanity and carry out the greatest ideas of the present age, the glorious idea of human brotherhood."

Actress, playwright, and jazz pianist Marjorie Eliot feels a powerful kinship with and emotional closeness to Frances E. W. Harper. Both women--loving, Christian, working mothers. Both--lithe, graceful, and soft-spoken. Both--gutsy, disciplined, and dedicated to social justice and the wholeness of families. Both--persuaded that personal survival and well being are inextricably linked to the well being and survival of the larger society. Both--craftswomen of the spoken and written word.

A member of the original cast and touring company of Charles Gordone's Pulitzer prize winning No Place to be Somebody, Marjorie Eliot has appeared in Phillip Hayes Dean's The Owl Killer, Every Night When the Sun Goes Down, Sty of the Blind Pig, and Black Noel and has performed at the American Place, Public and Phoenix Theaters. A prolific playwright, she has seen her Branches From the Same Tree performed at the New Federal Theater and many Off Off Broadway theaters. Ms. Eliot has been a writer in residence and an acting teacher at the Hudson Valley Freedom Theater, creating its adult and childrens' theater programs. Hudson Valley's artistic director, Curt Stewart, produced twenty of her plays during her tenure, including The Circle is Complete and Billy's Last Request.

On August 23, 1996, New York Times columnist David Gonzalez wrote a feature story about Marjorie Eliot entitled, "Living Room for Jazz Uptown Again." Every Sunday afternoon in New York City, Marjorie opens her living room to the public free of charge to come uptown and hear the best jazz musicians in New York play free of commercial pressure. Of the concerts, Ms. Eliot says, "It's experiencing the artist at work, like the difference between going to a film and going to the theater. This is our culture, it's not a joke. I see it as the essence of who African Americans are . . . when people get together, this is something nobody can take away or ever intrude on. Whatever creative expression we have and experience, nobody can do anything about it. Jesse Helms, eat your heart out!"

This same blazing, beautiful spirit radiates when Marjorie Eliot takes center stage as Frances Ellen Watkins Harper.

The technical requirements for A Brighter Coming Day include a simple stool. TBE will forward the simple light plot.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Frances E. W. Harper's poems, letters, speeches, and novels move the spirit, inspire the heart and provoke thought. Noted below are her writings and a few other books of interest:

Minnie's Sacrifice (1869), Sowing and Reaping (1876-77), Trial and Triumph (1888-89), Three Rediscovered Novels, edited by Frances S. Foster, Boston, Beacon Press, 1995, telephone 800 788 6262.

Iola Leroy, first published in 1892, New York, Schomberg Library of Nineteenth Century Black Women Writers and Oxford University Press, 1988, telephone 800 451 7556.

A Brighter Coming Day, A Francis Ellen Watkins Harper Reader, edited by Francis Smith Foster, New York, Feminist Press, 1990, telephone 800 283 3572.

Complete Poems of Frances E. W. Harper edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., New York, Schomberg Library of Nineteenth Century Black Women Writers and Oxford University Press, 1988, telephone 800 451 7556.

Discarded Legacy: Politics and Poetics in the Life of Francis E. W Harper, by Melba Joyce Boyd, Detroit, Wayne State University Press, 1984, telephone 800 978 7323.

Written By Herself: Literary Production by African American Women 1746-1892, Indiana University Press, 1993.

The Underground Railroad by William Still, originally Philadelphia, Porters and Coates, 1871; re-issued Chicago, Ebony Classics Series, Johnson Publishing, 1970.