ABSTRACT
Once, after I had lectured on Memoirs of Elleanor Eldridge at the University of Washington in Seattle, a colleague approached me to ask about the frontispiece image and title page I had projected (figure 1).1 Skeptically but eagerly she asked, “Are we supposed to believe that is what Eldridge looked like?” Throughout my years of working with the biography collaboratively authored by Eldridge and Frances Whipple (Green McDougall), I had consistently assumed that the arresting woodcut intaglio engraving of a dark-skinned woman prefacing all nine editions of Memoirs of Elleanor Eldridge and its oft-published companion Elleanor’s Second Book, first published the following year, in 1839, indeed was an artistic rendering of the eponymous subject of the biography. Now this insinuation that the image could not represent Eldridge propelled me anew. So, this essay asks a series of questions not only about the frontispiece portrait of Memoirs of Elleanor Eldridge and Elleanor’s Second Book, but also about two other books written by women of African descent that feature frontispiece portraits of the authors: Phillis Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773) (figure 2) and Religious Experience and Journal of Mrs. Jarena Lee, Giving an Account of Her Call to Preach the Gospel (1849) (figure 3).
