The First Slave Narrative by a Woman: The History of Mary Prince

Sara Penn’s “The First Slave Narrative by a Woman: ‘The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave’” appeared in the Women’s Print History Project’s 2020 Black Women’s and Abolitionist Print History Spotlight Series. Its value is not simply to recover a life that conventional literary histories often overlook. Penn asks how a book becomes legible in a database: when it is classified as political writing, attributed to a particular person, or surrounded by gaps in biographical information, whose knowledge enters the historical record, and what does the record lead readers to see? The title’s “first” belongs in the context of British print history; it should not be turned into a universal ranking of Black women’s testimony across places and traditions. In Prince’s case, cataloguing is not clerical work outside the text; it is part of the conditions under which the work enters public memory.

The WPHP records the 1831 History of Mary Prince as “Political Writing,” because the publication was used to expose slavery and argue for abolition. Penn also shows why a reader might classify it as memoir, history, or legal testimony. Each label changes the question: “political writing” foregrounds intervention in public debate; “memoir” invites attention to a life narrated from within; “legal” points to contests over evidence, credibility, and who can speak as a witness. If a database presents only one category, an editorial choice can look like the work’s natural, singular form. Feminist bibliography does not make classification neutral; it makes the reasoning, limits, and remaining ambiguity visible.

This matters especially when assigning authorship. The first edition’s subtitle says “Related by Herself,” yet publication was not an isolated act of putting pen to paper. Prince narrated her experience; Susanna Strickland took it down and worked on the text; Thomas Pringle supplied editorial framing and arranged testimony and other paratexts. The same volume also includes the narrative of Asa-Asa. To call the book an untouched, verbatim transcript would erase the collaborators’ role in shaping its printed form. But to transfer authorship to white abolitionists because they recorded and edited the words would take narrative authority away from Prince once again. Penn shows another possibility through the WPHP’s contributor records: recognize Prince as author of the account of her life while also naming the recorder, editors, and paratextual work. Authorship need not mean that one person physically wrote every word on the page; recognizing an oral author, however, does not make mediation disappear.

Prince’s first-person voice is therefore neither a transparent recording untouched by others nor a character invented by editors. Its force comes from concrete claims about the body, work, family, marriage, and freedom; its printed form was also shaped by abolitionist strategy, readers’ demands for credible testimony, and editorial decisions about how to arrange the material. A careful reading holds two questions together: what experience did Prince seek to bring into public view, and how did the publishers invite British readers to believe or doubt her account? The questions are connected, but they should not collapse into the shortcut that editing makes testimony suspect. The WPHP’s analysis makes collaboration visible without giving us a reason to reduce Prince’s experience to someone else’s representation.

Penn also attends to what the archive cannot supply. Prince’s birth date is estimated; records of the later years of her life and her death are incomplete. The essay connects this scarcity to a system that treated enslaved people as property rather than as subjects whose private lives merited consistent documentation. Missing information is not an invitation to fill the gaps with conjecture, and it cannot be used as evidence that Prince lacked judgment, relationships, or agency. Researchers can assemble limited traces from editions, court records, church histories, and local archives, but each inference needs a source and a visible degree of uncertainty. Searchable data is thus a feminist question: whose names, labor, and relationships become fields in a catalogue, and who appears only briefly in someone else’s record? Which facts can be verified, and which silences must remain acknowledged?

The WPHP is doing more than transferring an old catalogue to a digital interface. It separates editions and contributor roles—including authors, editors, printers, and booksellers—and explains how its records are verified. That method reminds FemRes readers that a digital archive is not history itself; it is a reading entrance built from search fields, categories, and rules of evidence. If the entrance makes only celebrated authors easier to find, women’s work in publishing, recording, and circulating texts can remain invisible. If it fills every gap by turning inference into fact, it creates new errors. Feminist bibliography has to do both things at once: widen visibility and preserve uncertainty.

Begin with FemRes’s reading guide to The History of Mary Prince, then use the Project Gutenberg landing page for the 1831 edition to read the narrative alongside its editorial paratexts. Ros Ballaster’s Oxford Faculty of English guide offers another set of questions, especially about bodily testimony and the contradiction between Prince’s freedom in England and her enslavement in Antigua. Penn’s WPHP essay can be read alongside the project’s methodology: one interprets a particular record; the other explains how a feminist print-history database decides what to record. Together, they show how Prince’s narrative continues to enter history through oral telling, editing, publication, classification, and later reading.