Mary Prince

Prince, Mary (c. 1788–?), West Indian slave narrator, also known as Molly Wood, Mary James, or Mary, Princess of Wales. Mary Prince was born in Bermuda. She worked as a household slave there and in Antigua and in the salt mines of Turk Island under the most brutal of conditions. In 1828, she went to England with her owners hoping to secure manumission. Unable to purchase her freedom and return to Antigua as a free woman, Prince dictated her story to Susanna Strickland, an abolitionist and poet. With Prince's approval, her narrative was pruned and edited for publication in accordance with the legal and social conventions governing the publication of such a controversial narrative. Little is known about Mary Prince beyond what is recorded in The History of Mary Prince, West Indian Slave, Related by Herself, first published as an antislavery tract in England in 1831, with supporting documentation furnished by Thomas Pringle, Prince's employer, editor, publisher, and secretary of the Anti-Slavery Society. After testifying before the London Court of Common Pleas in a suit brought by Pringle against Thomas Cadell of Blackwoods Magazine, on 21 February 1833, Prince disappeared from public record.

The recovery and republication of Prince's History (1987) reconfigures assumptions about race, gender, and cultural production in modern Caribbean literature. It illuminates the oral beginnings of the literature, and anticipates its defining paradigms, such as the relationship between written and oral narrative, metropolis and colony, elite and subaltern, exile and return. This unique document elucidates the discourse of struggle versus memory in African American literary circuits in respect to the autobiographies of those who do not write, and in respect to literature as a sanctioned space for the expression of social dissidence and marginality, especially among women.

Bibliography

• Sandra Pouchet Paquet, “The Heartbeat of a West Indian Slave: The History of Mary Prince,” Black American Literature Forum 26.1 (1992): 131–146.
• Moira Ferguson, introduction to The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave, Related by Herself, 1993.
• Brenda F. Berrian, “Claiming an Identity: Caribbean Women Writers in English,” Journal of Black Studies 25.2 (1994): 200–216

Sandra Pouchet Paquet