See chapter 4, "An Autobiography of Western American Integration: Eva Rutland and Her Alternative Politics of Respectability."
The focus here is not on Rutland's romance novels, which are mentioned only briefly in the Introduction: "the chapter locates Rutland within a tradition of Black women's autobiography, which finds political voice in motherhood. However, this chapter also takes a critical regionalist approach to Rutland's text by recognizing the adaptations Rutland makes to a Black woman's autobiographical tradition because of her specific situatedness in the geographic American West and within the West's color-blind sociopolitical climate while the rest of the nation battled over racial inequality" (31). However, Rutland was a romance author so this insight into other aspects of her life and writing may well be of interest to romance scholars. Here's a "brief biography" of her, from the Introduction:
Chapter 4 introduces Eva Rutland, a previously unstudied author from Sacramento, California. Born in 1917, Rutland grew up in Atlanta, Georgia, in a house her grandfather built after emancipation. The neighborhood was "a strange mixture of races and classes and creeds," and it was some distance from the all-Black neighborhood in which Rutland went to school and in which her family did most of their shopping and socializing. Rutland graduated from Spelman College in 1937 before marrying Bill Rutland, who was just beginning his career as a civilian engineer for the Tuskegee Airmen. [...] Once the air force integrated and decentralized, Rutland and her family were first relocated to Ohio and then to Sacramento, California, where they settled long term and enmeshed themselves in a thriving, middle-class Black community. Rutland started her writing career in the early 1950s, when her children were of school age. She was successful at getting a number of her fictional and nonfictional short stories published with women's magazines such as Ladies Home Journal, Redbook, and Women's Day. A few of these stories show up in altered forms in her maternal memoir, When We Were Colored, which was originally published by Abingdon, a Christian press, in 1964 under the title The Trouble with Being a Mama. The memoir was rather successful and remained in print up until the summer of 1972.
Throughout the late 1960s, as she dealt with an eye condition that caused her to go slowly blind, worked as a secretary for the California State Legislature, and helped her husband run for the school board, Rutland dedicated the majority of her writing efforts to a manuscript that was provisionally accepted for publication by Abingdon and titled "In Defense of Uncle Tom." The manuscript was ultimately declined by the press after it became apparent that the press and Rutland had different intentions for the project. In the late 1980s through the 1990s Rutland continued writing, but she turned to writing romance novels published by Harlequin Books. Although Rutland's agent once said she was "not a particularly prolific writer," Rutland published over twenty romance novels during this period and wrote two plays, one of which was selected to be performed at a Monterey, California, festival. In 1999 Rutland contributed a novella, "Choices," to Girlfriends, a collection of stories by Black women published by Harper Paperbacks. Girlfriends was also a success and was nominated for the NAACP Image Award. In addition, Rutland received the Golden Pen Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2000, and in 2003 she published a 414-page semi-autobiographical novel, No Crystal Stair. Rutland continued to make appearances in Sacramento bookstores and on the local news up until her death in 2012.
As this brief biography indicates, Rutland was successful in publishing in several different genres and with a variety of publication platforms. She was a dynamic writer with a keen sense of audience and of the influence literature has to reach people of differing backgrounds and ideologies. However, Rutland remains unstudied in academic circles. Although the University of Oregon, Eugene, has housed Rutland's archive since the 1990s, as I am writing this, there has yet to be an academic publication on Rutland and her writing. (29-30)
See chapter 4, "An Autobiography of Western American Integration: Eva Rutland and Her Alternative Politics of Respectability."
The focus here is not on Rutland's romance novels, which are mentioned only briefly in the Introduction: "the chapter locates Rutland within a tradition of Black women's autobiography, which finds political voice in motherhood. However, this chapter also takes a critical regionalist approach to Rutland's text by recognizing the adaptations Rutland makes to a Black woman's autobiographical tradition because of her specific situatedness in the geographic American West and within the West's color-blind sociopolitical climate while the rest of the nation battled over racial inequality" (31). However, Rutland was a romance author so this insight into other aspects of her life and writing may well be of interest to romance scholars. Here's a "brief biography" of her, from the Introduction: