Mary Prince
Autobiographer and Abolitionist · circa 1788
Who is Mary Prince?
Mary Prince was born into slavery in Bermuda around 1788 and became the first Black woman to publish a written account of her experience of slavery in Britain. She was sold between several enslavers in Bermuda and Antigua before being brought to London in 1828 by the Wood family, where British law meant she could not lawfully be forced back into slavery, though she remained without full freedom to return home without risk of re-enslavement. In London she connected with the Anti-Slavery Society, and in 1831 dictated her life story to Susanna Strickland, published as "The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave, Related by Herself." It was the first autobiography of a Black woman published in Britain and became a landmark text of the British abolitionist movement, running through three editions in its first year alone. Her unflinching first-person testimony of forced labor, beatings, and family separation gave abolitionists a direct, credible voice from within slavery itself, and the book remains a foundational document of both Black British literature and Bermudian history.
Sources: Mary Prince, The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave, Related by Herself (London, 1831) · Moira Ferguson (ed.), The History of Mary Prince, University of Michigan Press, revised edition 1997 · Bermuda National Trust, biographical records on Mary Prince