One of the earliest black women to write in English, Anne Hart offered a view into eighteenth- century African American Christianity, a religious approach to the lives of enslaved women in a West Indian plantation society, and valuable information about African practices among New World slaves. Her writings about Antiguan Methodism and enslaved women were preserved by a British missionary and came to light only in the 1990s. They are particularly valuable because writings by African American women of the eighteenth century are extremely rare.

Anne Hart's literary ambitions were rooted in her family and bloomed in a slave society. Her father, Barry Conyers Hart, collected books by English authors and published his own poetry in an Antiguan newspaper. The author of a history of Antiguan Methodism and a loving memoir of her husband, John Gilbert, Anne Hart spent years instructing Antiguan slaves in reading and Christian doctrine...