Love Across Color Lines: Ottilie Assing and Frederick Douglass - Hardcover

Diedrich, Maria

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0809016133 ISBN 13: 9780809016136

Publisher: Hill & Wang Pub, 1999

Synopsis

The tragic story of a German journalist and a black American abolitionist comes to life in an intriguing portrait that describes their loving relationship, which lasted twenty-eight years, and the misconceptions on both sides of how their love would end.

About this title

Review:

Mulatto ex-slave Frederick Douglass and half-Jewish, German-bred journalist Ottilie Assing were unlikely candidates for romance when they met in New York in 1856. But what began as an interview for a biography on the famed African American abolitionist turned into a torrid, extramarital love affair that lasted 28 years. In Love Across Color Lines, Maria Diedrich explores the labyrinthine sexual, social, and racial conventions of 19th-century American society with which these two intelligent people had to contend. Through Douglass and Assing's letters, Diedrich reconstructs the triumph and tragedy of their union. "Douglass was enchanted with his German companion, but he never again forgot that any liaison with a white woman could prove fatal to his political mission," she writes. "Assing," meanwhile, "respected the burden he had taken upon himself. She defied conventional notions of morality and became both intellectually and physically intimate with this extraordinary man, certain that he would marry her." When Douglass's wife died, however, he eventually married another (younger, white) woman--and Assing committed suicide. In addition to uncovering a vital aspect of Douglass's personal life largely overlooked by previous biographers, Diedrich's informative work looks at Assing's remarkable sacrifice, powered by a love that propelled her into America's bewildering racial wilderness. --Eugene Holley Jr.

About the Author:

Maria Diedrich is a professor of American studies at the University of Munster, Germany.

About this edition

• Publisher: Hill & Wang Pub
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0809016133
• ISBN 13: 9780809016136
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 480