Born to a white mother and an absent black father, and despised for her dark skin, Helga Crane has long had to fend for herself. As a young woman, Helga teaches at an all-black school in the South but even here she feels different. Moving to Harlem & eventually to Denmark, she attempts to carve out a comfortable life and place for herself, but ends up back where she started, choosing emotional freedom that quickly translates into a narrow existence. Nella Larsen’s powerful first novel, has intriguing autobiographical parallels & at the same time invokes the international dimension of African American culture of the 1920s. Slow, moving and reflective, Quicksand is a detailed and evocative portrayal of a biracial woman’s inner life.
