SOURCE: Gunning, Sandra. “Traveling with Her Mother's Tastes: The Negotiation of Gender, Race, and Location in Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands.” Signs 26, no. 4 (summer 2001): 949-81.

In the following essay, Gunning discusses Seacole's ability to successfully integrate herself into a wide variety of communities, as reflected in her autobiography. The critic also evaluates the different ways in which Wonderful Adventures has been appropriated by British and American scholars.

The autobiography Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands ([1857] 1984) by Jamaican mixed-race “Creole” Mary Jane Grant Seacole (1805-81) reveals a great deal about the complex interplay in the nineteenth century between gendered mobility, black diaspora identity, colonial power, and transnational circularity.¹ As a black entrepreneur and “doctress” who ran combination lodging houses and taverns in the Caribbean and Central America, Seacole relocated midcareer to Turkey during the Crimean War (1854-56) to service the needs of English soldiers...