The publication of An Intimation of Things Distant: The Collected Fiction of Nella Larsen in 1992 furthered the resurrection of Nella Larsen’s reputation as a significant figure of the Harlem Renaissance. Like her contemporary Jesse Redmon Fauset, Larsen was in the middle of the literary skirmishes between the champions of the Harlem Renaissance and those who saw the aestheticization of lower-class African American life as pandering to the Negrophilia of white Manhattanites.

Larsen’s subject matter was the light-skinned, middle-class African American woman who was “afflicted” and endowed with means, taste, and ambition. Larsen’s self-imposed limitations were decidedly unfashionable among the critics of the period, though popular with the general readership, but her works became anachronisms with the appearance of the works of Langston Hughes, Countée Cullen, and Claude McKay. Against the rough-hewn world depicted by these writers, Larsen’s genteel angst fared badly, not least because her concerns seemed mostly those of middle-class African American women with too much time on their hands.

While some, like James Weldon Johnson, George Schuyler, and Jean Toomer, returned again and again to the peculiarly African American phenomenon of passing for white, only Larsen conflated the problem of racial and class boundaries with the problem of gender in asking what it meant to be a middle-class African American woman in the first half of the twentieth century. In Passing, Larsen simultaneously treats three seemingly intractable issues in a provocative, if melodramatic, narrative. For that reason alone, the book represents a significant landmark in the history of American literature. Beyond its important subject matter, however, Passing provides a concise, unelaborated story. Larsen’s prose is sparse but effective. With a few deft strokes, characters become believable humans with vices and virtues. The plot moves swiftly, and the dialogue fleshes out characters and propels the narrative forward.

The principal theme of Passing is the social and cultural nexus in which light-skinned African American women find themselves. Though she never deals with it explicitly in her fiction, Larsen’s work implies, even more ominously, that if African American women whose skin is so light they can pass for white cannot “make it” without discrimination, darker-skinned African American women have no chance at all. By “making it,” Larsen means indirect but proximate access to economic, social, and cultural power. Passing takes for granted the hierarchies of race, class, and gender in American life. The three main female characters—Clare Kendry, Irene Redfield, and Gertrude Martin—understand that the best they can hope to do is to imitate white women. Both Clare and Gertrude have married white men, which is as close to real power—white male power—as they will ever get.

Irene, from whose point of view the story is told, disdains her female peers for their treason to their race, yet she too desires the proximity to power that Clare and Gertrude have by virtue of their marriages. This explains Irene’s hostility to Gertrude, a mere acquaintance, and her ambivalence in her relations with Clare, her friend. Irene envies their passing even as she detests it. When Irene believes Clare to be a threat to her marriage, she wishes Clare were dead. Yet, loyal to her race, she refuses to betray Clare to her husband when she has the opportunity to do so, knowing that he hates “niggers,” even though that same loyalty to race drives her to reveal her own race to him.

Passing also concerns the problem of class, which is at least as important to Irene as race, although the issue is raised explicitly only once when Irene thinks about Gertrude, who has married a white butcher. Marriage to...