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

Diedrich, Maria

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0809066866 ISBN 13: 9780809066865

Publisher: Hill and Wang, 2000

Synopsis

In this nuanced, sympathetic interpretation of two extraordinary lives, Maria Diedrich acquaints us with an important and little-known relationship. Ottilie Assing, an intrepid German journalist, met and interviewed Frederick Douglass in 1856, and it was an encounter that transformed the lives of both. Diedrich reveals in fascinating detail their intimate twenty-eight-year relationship, their shared intellectual and cultural interests, and their work together on Douglass's abolitionist writings. Love Across Color Lines is a profound meditation on nineteenth-century racial, class, and national boundaries, and offers new insights into the career of a preeminent American leader.

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, born in 1950, is a professor of American studies at the University of Münster, Germany. Since 1984, she has been a Fellow at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research at Harvard University.

About this edition

• Publisher: Hill and Wang
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0809066866
• ISBN 13: 9780809066865
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 512