Larsen’s Passing, like her first and more ambitious novel Quicksand (1928), explores black middle-class milieus and the lack of choices and alternatives available to women who are a part of them. Although on a surface reading the women in Passing appear to have choices, a closer scrutiny of the text suggests that they have few real options available to them. For those such as Clare who choose to pass, a white middle-class life-style, with its restrictions on possibilities for women, is offered. For women such as Irene, the same choices are present, only couched within middle-class respectability. In Quicksand, Helga Crane, the protagonist, travels across the United States and then to Europe in search of a place where she can live an authentic life. She spends much time complaining about the limited choices available to black middle-class women. For many of them, being respectable and good, which often means marrying a professional black man and having his children, are the only acceptable roles. In both novels, Larsen demonstrates the toll such limited choices take on her protagonists, who are both psychologically defeated.

Larsen’s novels, furthermore, examine black middle-class women’s lives from a different and more aesthetically challenging position than those of her contemporary, Jessie Fauset. Fauset usually had her protagonists not only acquiesce to marriage but also enjoy the subservience of it. Larsen’s novels, when compared to Fauset’s, present a more in-depth treatment of black middle-class subject matter.

Larsen’s novels look forward to a time when black female writers would be able to explore a wider range of subject matter and include even more options for black female characters. Deborah E. McDowell, for example, in the introduction to the 1986 America Women Writers reissue of Quicksand and Passing, suggests that Larsen proposed the alternative of lesbian sexual expression in her creation of the friendship of Irene and Clare. Black women writers of the 1980’s and 1990’s have freedom that Larsen did not have in creating character, subject matter, and theme.

With two slim novels and a short story as a record of her creative production, Nella Larsen is considered by most critics of African American literature to be of seminal importance in presenting the black female character’s way of viewing the world in the 1920’s. Such acclaim began appearing in the late 1970’s, when black feminist critics looked at Larsen’s work anew and resurrected it from a critical tradition that had denied it any authority.