Plum Bun: A Novel Without a Moral

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Revisit the critically acclaimed sophomore novel of Crisis editor Jessie Redmon Fauset, Plum Bun: A Novel Without a Moral (1928).

After the death of their parents, the Murray family consists of just two peopleVirginia, the younger darker-skinned teacher; and Angela, the elder fair-skinned artistboth Black, both women. While Virginia embraces her Blackness entirely; goes on to move to Harlem, teach Black children and marry a Black man, Angela outright rejects itopting to move to New York, pass for white, and use her privilege to shatter the glass ceiling of her race.

But is it enough While the act of passing gets her foot in the door; allows her the opportunity for artistic success and even leads to a romantic affair, as a woman theres only so far she can go and only so much respect she can garner. If being a woman, even a white woman, limits the ways in which she is able to seek fulfilment in her life, what is the point in trying to pass at all

Semi-autobiographical in nature, Plum Bun: A Novel Without a Moral is a coming-of-age novel that questions the intersectionality of race, class, and gender in the early twentieth century.

Author Bio

Jessie Redmon Fauset (1882--1961) was an African American editor, poet, and novelist. Born in Camden County, New Jersey, Fauset lost her mother and father at a young age and grew up in poverty alongside six siblings, three half-siblings, and three stepsiblings. Despite her troubled youth, she graduated as valedictorian from the Philadelphia High School for Girls before enrolling at Cornell University, where she studied classical languages and became one of the first Black woman accepted to the Phi Beta Kappa Society. After receiving a master's degree in French at the University of Pennsylvania, she began teaching at Dunbar High School in Washington, DC. In 1919, she became the literary editor of The Crisis, the official magazine of the NAACP, where she worked under founding editor W. E. B. Du Bois to elevate some of the leading voices of the Harlem Renaissance. In addition to her own writing, The Crisis under Fauset's editorship published Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, Nella Larsen, Langston Hughes, and Georgia Douglas Johnson. Between 1924 and 1933, she published four novels exploring themes of racial discrimination and passing, including There Is Confusion (1924) and Plum Bun (1928). She earned a reputation as a writer who sought to capture the lives of working professionals from the Black community, thereby providing a realistic portrait of her culture.