SOURCE: Hawthorne, Evelyn J. “Self-Writing, Literary Traditions, and Post-Emancipation Identity: The Case of Mary Seacole.” Biography 23, no. 2 (spring 2000): 309-31.

In the following essay, Hawthorne explores first-generation emancipated Caribbean subjects. Focusing on Mary Seacole's autobiography, she places the work within the ideological and literary contexts of Victorian England as well as the context of Caribbean history.

“… unless I am allowed to tell the story of my life in my own way, I cannot tell it at all.”

Written at the height of the Victorian period, The Wonderful Adventures of Mary Seacole in Many Lands (1857) is a paradigmatic black woman's text of self-authoring that has been lauded as “one of the most readable and rewarding black women's autobiographies in the nineteenth century” (Andrews, Introduction xxviii). Representing a locus classicus of culturally sanctioned feminine self-reliance, it was written and published in England by Mary Jane Grant Seacole (1805-1881), a free-born Jamaican...