Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands - Hardcover

by Mary Seacole (Author), William L. Andrews (Illustrator), William L. Andrews (Introduction by)

A far cry from the nineteenth-century slave narrative tradition, this book, written in 1857, is a special kind of success story. With delightful urbanity and wit, Mary Seacole, a free-born Jamaican Creole, recounts her childhood as a daughter of a Scottish army officer and a free black boarding-house keeper, her years as a storekeeper in a Central American frontier town, and her role as a battlefield 'doctress' to British troops in the Crimean War. She emerges as an independent and respected maternal figure, the acme of female achievement in Victorian culture, and a symbol of 'home' to British soldiers alienated by war.

Back Jacket

No autobiography by an Afro-American woman of the nineteenth century defies classification more than Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands (1857). A free-born Jamaican, evidently well protected from the tentacles of slavery, Mary Jane Grant Seacole did not write her narrative expressly to advance the cause of antislavery, as so many Afro-American women autobiographers did during her era.