内拉·拉森

内勒·拉森 (Nella Larsen，1891年4月13日—1964年3月30日）是一位美国小说家。她曾经是一名护士和图书管理员。

拉森的父亲是来自丹属西印度群岛的非洲裔加勒比人与白人的混血儿。拉森的母亲是一位丹麦移民。内勒·拉森生于芝加哥南区。

Nella Larsen (born Nellie Walker) was an American novelist, nurse, and librarian. She published two novels—Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929)—and a few short stories.

A revival of interest in her writing has occurred since the late 20th century. Her works have been the subjects of numerous academic studies involving issues of racial and sexual identity, and she has been lauded as "not only the premier novelist of the Harlem Renaissance, but also an important figure in American modernism."

Early life and education

Nella Larsen was born Nellie Walker, in a poor district of south Chicago known as the Levee, on April 13, 1891 (though Larsen would frequently claim to have been born in 1893). Her mother was Pederline Marie Hansen, an ethnically Danish immigrant, born in 1868 in Bernstorfsminde, a small hamlet in the parish of Brahetrolleborg. Migrating to the USA around 1886 and going by the name Mary, Larsen's mother worked as a seamstress and domestic worker in Chicago.

Larsen's father was Peter Walker, a "colored" immigrant from the Danish West Indies (now the U.S. Virgin Islands). Walker and Hansen filed an application for a marriage license in 1891, indicating a clear intent to marry around the time Nella Larsen was born. Despite the application, an actual license or record of the ceremony has not been found in historical archives. Walker was probably a descendant on his paternal side of Henry or George Walker, white men from Albany, New York, who were known to have settled in the Danish West Indies in about 1840. In the Danish West Indies, the law did not recognise racial difference, and racial lines were more fluid than in the former slave states of the United States. Walker may never have identified as "Negro." He abandoned the family within a year of Nella's birth. Following his disappearance, he effectively vanished from the historical record. She said he had died when she was very young. At this time, Chicago was filled with immigrants, but the Great Migration of Black people from the South had not begun. Near the end of Walker's childhood, the Black population of the city was 1.3% in 1890 and 2% in 1910.

Larsen's mother then married Peter Larsen (A.K.A. Larson, b. 1867), a fellow Danish immigrant, in November 1898—six years after the birth of their first daughter together and seven years after the disappearance of Peter Walker. Some have hypothesized that Larsen’s biological father and her stepfather were actually the same man "passing" for white, while others have argued that they were two distinct individuals. In 1892 the couple had a daughter, Anna Elizabeth, also known as Lizzie (married name Gardner). Nellie took her stepfather's surname, sometimes using versions spelled Nellye Larson and Nellie Larsen, before settling finally on Nella Larsen. The mixed family moved to a mostly white neighborhood of German and Scandinavian immigrants on the South Side of Chicago, but encountered discrimination because of Nella.

The American author and critic Darryl Pinckney wrote of her anomalous situation:

as a member of a white immigrant family, she [Larsen] had no entrée into the world of the blues or of the black church. If she could never be white like her mother and sister, neither could she ever be black in quite the same way that Langston Hughes and his characters were black. Hers was a netherworld, unrecognizable historically and too painful to dredge up.