African American Review

This essay argues for the benefit of attending to the early family life and Canadian upbringing and education of late nineteenth-century author Amelia Etta Hall Johnson. Locating Johnson and her family within black communities in Baltimore, Toronto, and Montreal highlights a series of useful relations which might provide a better understanding of Johnson’s work, particularly her last understudied novel, Martina Meriden. More broadly, reading Johnson as the product of a multilingual, ethnically and racially diverse Montreal, forwards new ways of thinking about her characters, often understood as racially ambiguous.