In the preface to Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s first collection, Violets and Other Tales (1895), fellow New Orleans club member and activist Sylvanie F. Williams introduced the (then unknown) twenty-year old author as “belong[ing] to that type of the ‘brave new woman who scorns to sigh.’” This explicit allusion to an 1894 British poem entitled “The New Woman” has gone largely unnoticed by scholars, despite its clear significance for the construction of Dunbar-Nelson’s authorial identity as she entered the national literary scene. I read this conspicuous gap (both in New Woman and Dunbar-Nelson studies) as resulting from a conjunction of factors. The apparent separation, in Dunbar-Nelson’s early work, between her treatment of issues relating to gender and those relating to race has long perplexed critics while the difficulty of applying an essentially white middle-class feminist trope to a textual corpus departing from this normative category has created a blind spot in New Woman studies. Rather than eschew this tension, I regard it as a productive starting point for a reconsideration of the New Woman’s subversive potential beyond its accepted cultural scope and for a reappraisal of Dunbar-Nelson’s supposedly “sectional” activism. This assumption about her work derives from the analysis of a limited subset of short stories depicting unracialized female characters in the only two collections published in her lifetime. However, an examination of the extensive material made available posthumously reveals more radical experimentations with the New Woman that disrupt the archetype by throwing into relief its racial and class specificity. This paper compares well-known pieces like “The Woman” (1895) and “At Eventide” (1895) with lesser-known stories such as “Natalie” (c. 1898) and “Witness for the Defense” (c.1900) to argue that Dunbar-Nelson’s Creole heroines subvert the figure of the New Woman and repurpose it in the service of a more intersectional critique.