Marilyn Elkins describes the author of Iola Leroy as "the major black female poet of the [19th] century." The novel was one of the first published by an African-American woman (Elkins 44).

Watkins Harper was also well-known in the 19th century as a writer and speaker for the abolitionist, suffragist, and temperance movements (Alexander). Her Christian ideals inform the novel's explicit religious morals, in which Iola and other characters urge temperance and Biblical teaching (Ernest 507).

Furthermore, Watkins Harper evokes meaningful figures and contemporaries in her activist tradition. As John Ernest points out, even the protagonist's name "recalls the pen name, 'Iola,' used by the educator and journalist Ida B. Wells" (509).

We can read Iola Leroy as a direct response to anti-Black literature, in which "writers [like Thomas Dixon and Thomas Nelson Page] presented blacks as either evil or as the ludicrous targets for supposedly harmless laughter" (Elkins 45).

By representing Black characters of multiple skin tones and educational backgrounds, Watkins Harper further "answer[s] frequent charges made by whites of the period that talented and intelligent Negroes owed their capabilities to their white blood" (Elkins 45). In characters like Iola and her brother Harry, Watkins Harper portrays biracial and light-skinned African-Americans who assert agency in their lives as well as a strong identity within the Black community.