Eslanda: The Large and Unconventional Life of Mrs. Paul Robeson

Born into a middle-class family and married to Paul Robeson, one of the most famous black personalities of the twentieth century, Eslanda Cardozo Goode Robeson was determined to make her mark on the world. Barbara Ransby has rescued Eslanda from the shadow of her famous husband and placed her in proper perspective as a black, radical female activist, a scholar, and a critic. Ransby describes Eslanda's early years and the experience that encouraged her political transformation, as well as her later years (1948–1965), when dissent was increasingly stifled and anticommunist hysteria was at an all-time high. Such a background enabled Eslanda to find her voice.

In a deeply contextualized biography, Ransby delineates the larger framework within which Eslanda operated. Her career and commitment to liberation struggles took her to colonial Africa, the Spanish Civil War, Nazi- occupied Berlin, Joseph Stalin's Russia, Mao Zedong's revolution in China, Joseph McCarthy's House Committee on Un-American Activities, and, of course, the civil rights struggle in the United States. Ransby also discusses how Eslanda dealt with the issue of gender—the struggle for a black woman to gain recognition and acceptance in a man's world. In describing all of these issues, Ransby demonstrates the sustaining power of a shared culture and reminds scholars of the importance of placing an individual or group in a cultural context.

Writing this book does not appear to have been easy for Ransby. In the author's own words,

Despite a writer's best effort to whip the facts into line, an individual life is not a neat chronicle of events and themes. It is therefore the biographer's task to give a kind of artificial coherence to a human journey that is by definition, messy, circuitous, at odds with itself, and at times utterly inexplicable. (p. 277)

Yet, to her credit, Ransby has done a remarkable job scouring a wide range of primary and secondary sources to locate Eslanda in time and place. Ransby's book has all the hallmarks of an award-winning book. Perhaps most noteworthy, she has written a biography that is interesting to both scholars and general readers.