Seraph on the Suwanee had trouble being published. Zora Neale Hurston wanted to publish it from the Lippincott, which had published all of her former works but refused to continue to publish it. They were not satisfied with Hurston's original idea about Seraph. With Rawling's help, a white friend of hers, she could finally publish it from the Scribners'. The first printing sold well, but because of her personal affairs, this work gradually disappeared from the shelves of bookstores.
This work has also been negatively evaluated for some reasons. One of them is that it was taken as an assimilationist work to the white culture. Hurston had written her works using black people except Moses, Man of the Mountain. The readers were not satisfied with its white characters and criticized it in the way that she forsook her own black culture. The second reason is that the readers, especially the feminist readers, felt embarrassed with Arvay's last decision, which seemed to them that she accepted the chauvinistic way of life.
The standpoint of my reading Seraph is to probe these negative evaluations, reading Seraph intensively, and checking Hurston's former works and to judge whether Hurston maintains her theme coherently.