Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands

Abstract

The daughter of a Scottish soldier and a Jamaican herbalist, Mary Seacole (1805–81) gained recognition for her provision of care to British troops during the Crimean War. She had travelled widely in the Caribbean and Panama before venturing to England to volunteer as an army nurse in the Crimea. Although rebuffed by officials, an undeterred Seacole funded her own expedition, establishing the British Hotel near Balaclava to provide a refuge for wounded officers. Known affectionately as 'Mother Seacole' among the men, yet returning to England bankrupt at the end of hostilities, she had her plight highlighted in the press. First published in 1857, and reissued here in its 1858 printing, her autobiography was intended to share her story and restore to her some financial security. Probably dictated to her editor, who then polished the text for publication, this was the first autobiography by a black woman in Britain.

Travel as Subversion in 19<sup>th</sup> Century Black Women’s Narratives

“…The contention here is that such re-readings reveal a re-spatialization of the discursive as well as geo-political maps of the African Diaspora experience in the Atlantic world. Specifically, the travel narratives of Prince (1995) and Seacole (1990) deconstruct a cultural memory which has tended to marginalize black women's impact on defining and shaping the contours and character of the historical discourse of African people in the Americas. Travel narratives represent one of these sites of cultural memory, and one can argue that the narratives of these women have the effect of disrupting the power status of race and gender as defining constructs; they further interrogate nationalist narratives of belonging and geographic boundaries as containing discourses of black female identity.…”

“…Black women then, in this paradigm, negotiate not only a world where sexism and racism collude to hold them prisoners, but they also liberate themselves by actively engaging their liminal space and renegotiating both geographical and discursive maps of their existence. The extent to which the experiences of travel reshape Prince's (1995) and Seacole's (1990) conceptualization of identity, belonging, and self is of critical importance in this study. Cultural identity, migration, homelessness, exileness, and borders-metaphoric and geographic-are links in the expression of new world Africana women's identity during and immediately after slavery; thus the study here elaborates this dimension of their experiences and underscores key insights about the uniqueness of their travel writings.…”

Subjectivity in Motion: Caribbean Women's (Dis)Articulations of Being from Fanon/Capécia to theWonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands

“…Seacole's Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands (Seacole 1857/2005) has essentially been considered the product of its author's need for self‐fashioning for differing ends. Depending on the critic, who one may assume to reflect different communities of readership, Seacole's text is variously read as a narrative of “Englishness” (Gikandi ; Poon ), of Jamaican creolity (Hawthorne ; Frederick ), of transatlanticism (Gunning ), or, as Cheryl Fish contends, as reflective of a “mobile subjectivity” (Fish , 6).…”

Gendered spaces, gendered pages: Union women in Civil War nurse narratives

“…While Florence Nightingale's 1858 Subsidiary Notes as to the Introduction of Female Nursing into Military Hospitals in Peace and War and Notes on Nursing: What It Is, and What It Is Not (in a first American edition of 1860) were didactic and hardly narrative, they provided a justification for women's professional nursing service in wartime hospitals 16 28. In 1857 Nightingale's British Afro-Caribbean compatriot Mary Seacole had published the picaresque Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands as a means of securing English recognition for her Crimean work (which Nightingale had disparaged) 29. Closer to home for Union women, Louisa May Alcott's 1863 Hospital Sketches (a novelisation of her earlier newspaper articles about her brief nursing service) provided a narrative template for a woman's call to duty, sense of the immensity of war's horror, and the challenges to insinuating herself into a male domain 30…”