This biography of Philippa Schuyler is an engrossing portrait of two women. Their relationship was smotheringly, claustrophobically symbiotic. They were also astoundingly alike. It is just that one was white and one was black.

Josephine, Philippa's mother, was white, from one of the first families of Texas. In 19, in her late 20s, she moved to Greenwich Village. For years she had been sending stories and poetry to the black journal Messenger, and she had enjoyed the satirical pieces by the editor, George Schuyler. One day, having fussed all morning about what to wear, she set out for his office. "A firestorm began raging in her mind as she stood in the doorway," writes Kathryn Talalay. "He was stunning," Josephine wrote in her diary. "His black skin gleamed like satinwood and his hands were as long and graceful as the wings of a raven."

Three weeks later she wrote in her diary: "By all moral and social logic I should now be feeling disgust. I This morning George possessed me. I Somehow, strangely enough, I feel ennobled."

Josephine, who makes much of her black lover's virility and "gigantic anatomy", tells her diary things she does not say to him. "I want to say 'Devour me, Negro, devour me.' Aloud I say, 'I should like you to kill me, Schuyler.' " She admits she likes to "feel like a white rabbit caught in the coils of a glistening black snake".

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Josephine had a theory that the white race was "spiritually depleted" and that "America must mate with the Negro to save herself". She had little trouble persuading Schuyler to marry her. But she could not bring herself to tell her family.

"In a curious lapse into racism," writes Talalay, "she believed her whiteness (in addition to her beauty) would be a bulwark against future infidelity once they became husband and wife." A lapse into racism? All the evidence in Josephine's diary suggests that this manipulative Southern belle wanted a black man precisely because she was racist. Schuyler excited her primarily as a "Negro".

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Philippa Schuyler was born in August 1931 in their Harlem apartment. From the beginning she was destined to be living proof of Josephine's thesis about interracial marriage. And she was quite extraordinary. By the time she was four, she was writing stories and entering musical competitions. She played the piano brilliantly and she even performed her own compositions. Her concert tours soon became an important supplement to the family income.

Josephine recorded her daughter's development in a series of scrapbooks. "When I take you to the library on 145th Street the lady librarian makes a great deal of fuss over you," she writes. "It is very nice having an accomplished daughter. I glow with pride. If only we can keep this up, darling, maybe you can be a great personality in the world." More than this, Philippa was to be an example to her motherland. "We, and especially you," writes Josephine to her young daughter, "are a challenge to the set notions of America on race."

Josephine attributed her child's genius to "hybrid vigour" and their diet of raw food (including steak). She strictly followed John Broadus Watson's spartan regime for childrearing. No kissing except ("if you must") to say goodnight. Up at 6.30am, bed at 7pm - hands under the covers for thumb-suckers, hands over the covers for masturbators.

When Philippa was 13 her mother showed her the scrapbooks. The girl started to suffer from nerves and depression. She was also beginning to realise a few truths about the racial divide. Why, when she was as good as she was, were white audiences ignoring her? And why was she snubbed by her own mother's family? When Josephine visited her family home, she never took her coloured daughter with her.

As an adult, Philippa spent as much time abroad as possible, giving one exhausting concert tour after another, in South America, Europe, Africa, Asia. In Europe, unlike America, she was treated like a human being. She hoped to marry and live there.

In addition to her music, this extraordinary woman wrote. She had two books published in her lifetime. But Who Killed the Congo? (1962), based on her travels there, was often inaccurate as well as virulently anti-communist. Ghana's President Kwame Nkrumah was moved to write to her: "Little did I suspect you to be such a forthright advocate of Colonialism in Africa."

Jungle Saints (1963) was a poorly written celebration of missionary work in Africa. Philippa was now a converted Catholic.

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Philippa wanted a husband, but she and her mother agreed he had to be white. When she found a prospective Frenchman she wrote to her mother: "He has a good heredity from the breeding viewpoint, don't you think? His 'Aryan appearance' [Aryan?] would make their child 'olive-skinned'," she assured her mother, and "with straight hair." When she became pregnant by a black man, she was frantic and arranged, with enormous difficulty, for an abortion. She never married.

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In her thirties, Philippa went so far as to change her name and fabricate a fictional identity so she could pass as a Latina and play to white audiences. It was an extraordinary thing for her to do, and a measure of her desperation. She managed it, with the aid of a brown hairpiece. The duplicity of it all did not seem to rattle her.

This biography does not leave us with a solid sense of the inner woman. Talalay pays most attention to the public persona, the newspaper articles, and the reviews of Schuyler's concerts. The first half, which focuses on the mother-daughter relationship and includes large chunks of Josephine's diary and scrapbooks, is by far the best. The second half tends to disintegrate into a travel itinerary.

Given the effusive prose of her two subjects, perhaps it is not inappropriate that Talalay's narrative is full of phrases like "Josephine continued to pour her heart out". Philippa (Talalay often calls her "Phil") is constantly "fascinated" or "enthralled". But does she really have to "concertize"? And why should we have to put up with apostrophes in the wrong places? Whatever happened to the editors at Oxford University Press?

Philippa Schuyler reminds me of her famous white American contemporary, Sylvia Plath. Their remarkable talent, their perfectionism and insecurity, and their awkward mix of emotional coldness and craving for love added up to terrible unhappiness. As adults, both felt great anger towards their mothers, but retained a childlike need to confide in them. And both met a shocking end in their thirties.

Philippa was killed in May 1967 in a helicopter crash in Vietnam. A final paradox in a paradoxical life: she was helping evacuate children from a Catholic orphanage in war-torn Hue to greater safety in Da Nang.

Two years later, in their Harlem apartment, Josephine wedged the faded blue drapes in her bedroom door and hanged herself.

Philippa Schuyler's remarkable life is a disturbing, distressing story for many reasons. Josephine believed her daughter's brilliance would challenge "the set notions of America on race". Tragically, on the altar of America, Philippa Schuyler would become a sacrificial lamb. More tragically still, the Schuylers internalised and in many ways reinforced the same old "set notions" on race.

Hazel Rowley is senior lecturer in literary studies, Deakin University, Melbourne.

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