Love Across Color Lines

Ottilie Assing and Frederick Douglass

by Maria Diedrich

This study of the little-known intimate relationship between Frederick Douglass and Ottilie Assing, a German journalist, is based on their journals and letters and shows them to be mutually-supportive intellectual soulmates who never were to marry. A New York Times Notable Book for 1999.

Available editions of Love Across Color Lines

	9780809016136, Hardcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1999 $4.20 (Used - Very Good) Other copies of 9780809016136

	9780809066865, Paperback, Hill & Wang Pub, 2000 $4.00 (Good) Other copies of 9780809066865

Publisher Notes

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.

Media Reviews

"The power of Maria Diedrich's book is a testament to the scholarly judiciousness--one could say the moral sense--of its author. Diedrich tries to give the relationship the same respect that a sympathetic historian gives a failed revolution--taking care to reflect, first of all, upon the dignified terms that the protagonists used to represent their endeavor, whatever its follies. It is not an easy job, because what seemed initially satisfying and even noble in the infidelity--the courage of love across the color line--turned hurtful and hard."

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