a large inheritance left by her aunt, Lavina Chase. With it, she bought a house in Rumford, Rhode Island before passing away a few years later on October 22, 1938, of heart disease. She was buried in Moshassuck Cemetery in Central Falls, Rhode Island beside her family. Authorship Emma Dunham Kelley-Hawkins was long considered a pioneer of African American women's literature, and for a brief time, was looked upon as the first published African American women novelist. Her body of work consists of two novels: Megda (1891) and Four Girls at Cottage City (1895). A third novel, to be a sequel to Megda, was drafted but never published. According to scholars, owing to such factors as race and gender, much like other Black women writers at the time, Kelley-Hawkins’s works fell into obscurity and were mostly forgotten, even before her passing. Her novels were, however, included in various collections and bibliographies, including A Century of Fiction by American Negros 1853-1952: A Descriptive Bibliography (1955), Charles L. Blockson’s bibliography of African American Literature, as well as other encyclopedias and compilations by Robert A. Corrigan, Carole McAlpine, and Robert Whitlow. Her work was later rediscovered by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., serving as an inspiration for him to compile the 40-volume Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers in 1988. While many African American writers at the time dealt explicitly with issues of race, Kelley-Hawkins's work did not treat themes of racial uplift. They were absent of Black characters and matters of race, instead focusing mainly on themes of religion and gender, while also addressing issues of education, region, social class, and so on. This treatment is similar to fiction by other black authors of the period, including selected works by Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Frank J. Webb, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and Amelia E. Johnson, for example. Kelley-Hawkins’s novels, often considered anomalous among the African American literary tradition by presiding scholarship, follow the lives of young girls and are characterized by their Christian outreach, spiritual feminism, and the whiteness of their characters. Megda (1891) Written in dedication to her mother, Megda was Kelley-Hawkins’s first published novel. It follows the experiences of Megda, a young girl studying to be a schoolteacher, and a group of similar, middle-class girls through their Christian conversions and journeys to womanhood and wifehood. It focuses heavily on religious themes of salvation and gentility as it explores women’s acceptance and