ABSTRACT
Black women authored almost no books in England during the eighteenth and early-nineteenth century. This is largely due to their relatively small presence – they constituted barely twenty per cent of the black metropolitan population. Additionally, the critic Ziggi Alexander has argued that the Puritan belief in African women’s innate licentiousness led anti-slavery campaigners to highlight male suffering when promoting Abolitionism. Josiah Wedgwood’s hugely popular 1788 medallion showed a distrait negro imploring ‘Am I Not A Man And A Brother?’ With the exception of Phillis Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects (1773), a volume which tended to dwell on themes relating to nature and classical mythology, the perspective of the woman and the sister was not heard until the publication in 1831 of the memoirs of Mary Prince (c.1788–c.1833). As with Ukawsaw Gronniosaw and John Jea, most of what is known about her life is restricted to those facts contained in her autobiography which was transcribed by the minor poet Susanna Strickland and edited by Thomas Pringle, the Methodist Secretary of the Anti-Slavery Society, whose family she served after escaping from her master and mistress.
