Iola Leroy "may well have [been] influenced" by Harriet Jacobs's 1861 autobiography Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.[18]
The novel was "awarded more blame than praise" by literary critics, but "initial readers responded positively",[19] causing the novel to be reprinted until 1895. From then on, however, it was not re-published until 1971.[20]
Iola Leroy was for some time cited as the first novel written by an African-American woman. Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s 1982 discovery of Harriet Wilson's Our Nig (1859) displaced it from that spot.[19] Still, it remains important as "the first black vision of black women's roles in reshaping post-Civil War America"[20] and as a fictional work dealing with complex issues of race, class, and politics in the United States. Recent scholarship suggests that Harper's novel provides a sophisticated understanding of citizenship, gender, and community, particularly the way that African Americans developed hybrid forms of gemeinschaft and gesellschaft before, during, and after slavery.[21]
The African-American journalist Ida B. Wells took up the pen name "Iola" when she first started writing articles about racism in the South.[22]
According to J. F. Yellin, Iola Leroy "helped shape the writings of Zora Neale Hurston and other foremothers of black women writing today."[18]
