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“... if there is a hint of Africa in his or her make-up. John Bellew, the husband of Clare Kendry in Nella Larsen’s exquisite novel Passing (1929), responds violently when he finds out that Clare, who has cheeks of ‘ivory’ and hair the colour of ‘pale gold’, is ‘black’. All those years, John had been deceived into thinking Clare was something ...”

“... Could​ Nella Larsen pass? Looking at a photograph of her by Carl Van Vechten, I doubt she could. Her skin was described by one interviewer as the colour of ‘brown honey’, by another as ‘maple syrup’, but the darkness of her complexion was never enough to quash rumours that she was passing in Harlem ...”

“... in the town as a free woman. And between my first and second reading of The Vanishing Half, I read Nella Larsen’s Passing, published in 1929, which takes two childhood friends, one who passes permanently for white and one who sometimes lets people think what they want to about her race, and pulls them into conflict. In the novella, the woman who ...”

“... Marianne Moore, H.D. and Sylvia Plath. The Harlem Renaissance novelists, Jessie Redmon Fauset, Nella Larsen and Zora Neale Hurston, have a collective chapter as well; and elsewhere the authors manage to work in a reference to nearly every famous, fleeting, highbrow or popular woman writer of the century. Gilbert and Gubar define the overall theme of ...”

“... McKay, Jean Toomer, Countee Cullen, Sterling Brown, Gwendolyn Bennett, Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larsen, Wallace Thurman and Rudolph Fisher. ‘The array of personalities in the literary area is startling,’ one of them wrote. ‘Few were born in New York, although we speak of the Harlem Renaissance. Claude McKay, one of the movement’s ...”

“... of an Ex-Colored Man), William Faulkner (Light in August, Absalom! Absalom!, Go down, Moses) and Nella Larsen (Passing) – all of whom examined the meaning of American freedom as flight across the colour line. Like his predecessors, Ellison was entering the culturally charged territory of ‘racial passing’ – the attempt of non-whites to pass as ...”

“... shouted. ‘How can you have fun with the colour line staring you in the face. I never could.’Nella Larsen’s first novel, Quicksand, which follows the fortunes of a beautiful mixed-race woman who bears more than a passing resemblance to Larsen herself, is prefaced by four lines from Hughes’s poem ...”