SOURCE: Robinson, Amy. “Authority and the Public Display of Identity: Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands.” Feminist Studies 20, no. 3 (fall 1994): 537-57.

In the following essay, Robinson discusses how Seacole negotiates her marginal identity as a Creole woman and describes the maneuvers necessary to become a prominent member of society in Victorian England.

Only twenty-four years after the “official” abolition of slavery in the British West Indies, Mary Seacole, “the yellow woman from Jamaica with the cholera medicine,”¹ published Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands. This engaging autobiography, which has been all but erased from feminist, Caribbean, and British literary histories, embodies the tensions and contradictions of a female subject who authorizes herself by staging the confines of a patriarchal colonialist discourse. Like Emily Dickinson, Linda Brent, and even her better known white counterpart Florence Nightingale, Mary Seacole relied on the very social conventions which...