When first published by the American Baptist Publication Society in 1894, The Hazeley Family was advertised as 'a book that should be in every Sunday-school library'. The novel is typical of the 'angel of the home' romances written by American women in the later nineteenth century. It tells how the moral fibre of Flora Hazeley keeps her family together - a constant concern in Afro-American literature and life. The characters are 'non-racial', one of the tactics that many black writers used to overcome the racial sterotypes demanded by the white establishment.