Sunshine in the Palace and Cottage or, Bright Extremes in Human Life de Urbino, Levina Buoncuore as Urbino, L. B - 1854

Boston: Heath and Graves, 1854. First Edition. hardcover. VG in red cloth with gilt lettering & decoration on spine. Light wear to spine extremities and occasional light foxing throughout. An ante-bellum novel of some importance concerning mixed race as discussed in this essay by Eric Gardner: "...there were several early examples of a discourse of mixed-race heroines running counter to the figure of the tragic mulatta-one in which the mixed-race heroine not only avoids a tragic end but actually embraces her genealogy, uses her visual racial indeterminacy to aid nation-building and self-empowerment, and finds fulfillment in a multi-racial family housed within the larger Black community. Specifically, I examine two previously unknown mixed-race heroines who are ultimately far from tragic-indeed, who seem almost consciously constructed as revisions to the tragic mulatta type. This essay argues that, in different ways, the protagonists of both Levina B. Urbino's Sunshine in the Palace and Cottage (1854) and Louise Palmer Heaven's In Bonds (published in 1867 under the pseudonym Laura Preston) explode many of the expectations of the tragic mulatta type" [Coloring History and Mixing Race in Levina Urbino's Sunshine in the Palace and Cottage and Louise Heaven's In Bonds, LEGACY Vol. 24, No.2, 2007]