SOURCE: Paquet, Sandra Pouchet. “The Enigma of Arrival: The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands.” African American Review 26, no. 4 (winter 1992): 651-63.

In the following essay, Paquet explores Seacole's relationship to colonial England in the aftermath of slavery and how she positions herself in that society.

The republication of The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave (1831) and The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands (1857) in 1987 and 1988, respectively, provides a new understanding of the constitutive relationship of autobiography to the cultural inheritance of the colonial and postcolonial Caribbean. Originally published twenty-six years apart in England, across the great divide of the emancipation of slaves in 1834, the narratives of Mary Prince and Mary Seacole prefigure styles of being and identity in male-centered texts of twentieth-century Caribbean autobiography. They reconfigure Caribbean autobiography, which emerged as a predominantly male enterprise in the twentieth century, as the legacy...