When first published by the American Baptist Publication Society in 1894, The Hazeley Family was advertised as `a book that should be in every Sunday-school library'. The novel is typical of the `angel of the home' romances written by American women in the later nineteenth century. It tells how the moral fibre of Flora Hazeley keeps her family together - a constant concern in Afro-American literature and life. The characters are `non-racial', one of the tactics that many black writers used to overcome the racial sterotypes demanded by the white establishment.

Introduction by: Barbara Christian