Contending Forces

Published in 1900, this is Hopkins's best-known novel, and her only fiction to be published in book form in her lifetime. Like her magazine fiction, it employs the conventions of the sentimental novel with the goal of effecting social change. A uniquely detailed examination of black life, and a richly textured piece of fiction, it is one of the most important works produced by an Afro-American before the First World War.