Inside Higher Ed :: Insider

Inside Higher Ed :: Insider: "Holly Jackson thought she had a straightforward writing project when she was assigned to write an entry on Emma Dunham Kelley-Hawkins for the African American National Biography, a project forthcoming from Oxford University Press.

But Jackson, a Ph.D. student at Brandeis University, ended up finding out that Kelley-Hawkins has no business being in the African American National Biography. The 19th century novelist was white. Jackson details her discovery in an article in The Boston Globe, which may prompt quite a bit of revision in parts of the literary world.

That's because Kelley-Hawkins isn't just an entry in a biography project. Two of her novels -- Megda and Four Girls at Cottage City -- are in the Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers, a major publishing project of the Oxford press. Four Girls at Cottage City is described on the press's Web site as 'one precursor of the spiritual feminism that is currently resonating throughout contemporary Afro-American women's fiction.'

And these works appear on scores of syllabi, in dissertation chapters, in scholarly works -- all analyzed as early black fiction. 'I don't know what will be done now, but all kinds of chapters are now obsolete,' Jackson said in an interview Wednesday."