Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins was born in Portland, Maine, in 1859. She grew up in Boston, Massachusetts, and her family included influential African American ministers, leaders, abolitionists, and civil rights activists. Hopkins developed an interest in literature while attending Boston public schools. In 1874, she won an essay contest was organized by abolitionist and dramatist William Wells Brown. As a young woman, Hopkins pursued a career as a theatrical performer and singer. By the 1890s, she decided to shift her focus to writing. Hopkins wrote plays and several short stories before publishing her first novel, Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South in 1900. The work demonstrates Hopkins’s experimentation with the romantic novel to explore the issue of racism and the legacy of enslavement. Hopkins’s next two novels, Hagar’s Daughter: A Story of Southern Caste Prejudice and Winona: A Tale of Negro Life in the South and Southwest, were published serially in the Colored American Magazine, a literary journal dedicated to African American culture founded in 1900. Of One Blood, Hopkins’s final novel, was also serialized in the Colored American Magazine between 1902 and 1903.

Throughout her career, Hopkins emphasized the perspective of the African American community, pride in African heritage, and the uplift of Black people.