roles in the Christian community. Four Girls at Cottage City (1895) Kelley-Hawkins’s Four Girls at Cottage City, much like her first novel, Megda, focuses on themes of religion and spiritual feminism. It follows a group of four carefree, young girls vacationing at a Massachusetts resort during a summer religious camp meeting while each of them explores their religious beliefs, committing themselves to the Christian religion. Racial Identity For fifty years, Emma Dunham Kelley-Hawkins was touted and studied as a pioneer of African American women’s literature. However, in 2005, an article in the Boston Globe appeared, asserting the author’s identity as white. Later, in 2006, further genealogical research published indicated that Kelley-Hawkins was, in fact, white or identified herself as white. (National Genealogical Society Quarterly, Volume 94, No. 1, March 2006). Speculation has been made, assuming Kelley-Hawkins may have even descended from Irish immigrants. During the reconstruction of lost or forgotten African American literature, Kelley-Hawkins’s race, alongside others whose biographies and identities were unknown, was assumed based on what clues scholars could gather. No evidence, however, aside from a photograph pointed to her African heritage. In fact, through numerous examinations of US and state census records of Massachusetts and Rhode Island as well as her ancestral towns of Dennis, Yarmouth, Harwich, and Chatham, it has been discovered that neither Kelley-Hawkins nor her family members have ever identified as anything other than white. There were no traces of African heritage in her ancestry. Much scholarship has attributed the case of her racial misidentification to the frontispiece of her first novel, Megda, which for many, had served as indisputable evidence of her classification as African American. The first case of her labeling as African American has been traced back to her inclusion in A Century of Fiction by American Negros 1853-1952: A Descriptive Bibliography (1955), when Maxwell Whiteman assumed Kelley-Hawkins was of African descent based on the frontispiece, classifying her as a “Negro author” in her bibliography annotation. Subsequent compilations and bibliographies followed suit as she was later included in Charles L. Blockson’s bibliography of African American literature and served as inspiration for the 1988 Schomburg Collection of African American Women Writers of the Nineteenth-Century series. For fifty years, Kelley-Hawkins has been solidified as a trailblazer in Black women’s writing and an unquestionable contributor to the African American literary tradition. Many scholars have studied the lack of race in her novels, notions of