The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave (1831) was the first female slave narrative from the Americas. The Story of Mattie J.Jackson (1866) recounts a quest for personal freedom and ends with a family reunion in the North after the Civil War. The Memoir of Old Elizabeth, a Colored Woman (1863) is the tale of a 97-year-old ex-slave who became a preacher. Lucy A.Delaney's From the Darkness Cometh the Light or Struggles for Freedom (c. 1891) records a former slave's achievements in the quarter-century after the end of the Civil War. Kate Drumgoold and Annie L.Burton also describe their...

The past two decades have seen a dramatic resurgence of interest in black women writers, as authors such as Alice Walker and Toni Morrison have come to dominate the larger Afro-American literary landscape. Yet the works of the writers who founded and nurtured the black women's literary tradition--nineteenth-century Afro-American women--have remained buried in research libraries or in expensive hard-to-find reprints, often inaccessible to twentieth-century readers.
Oxford University Press, in collaboration with the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, a research unit of The New...

At the close of the 19th century, a black woman of the South presents womanhood as a vital element in the regeneration and progress of her race.

First published in May 1900, the Colored American Magazine provided a pioneering forum for black literary talent previously stifled by lack of encouragement and opportunity. Not only a prolific writer for the journal, Pauline Hopkins also served as one of its powerful editorial forces. This volume of her magazine novels, which appeared serially in the journal between March 1901 and November 1903, reveals Hopkins' commitment to fiction as a vehicle for social change. She weaves important political themes into the narrative formulas of nineteenth-century dime-store novels and story papers,...

The Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers
General Editor: HENRY LOUIS GATES, JR.
Oxford University Press, in collaboration with the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, a research unit of The New York Public Library, rescued the voice of an entire segment of the black tradition by offering volumes of compelling and rare works of fiction, poetry, autobiography, biography, essays, and journalism, written by nineteenth-century black women. Responding to the wide recognition this series has received, Oxford now presents four more of these volumes in...

Mary Seacole was born a free black woman in Jamaica of the early 19th century. In her long and varied life, she was to travel in Central America, Russia and Europe, find work as a inn-keeper and as a doctress during the Crimean War, and become a famed heroine, the author of her own biography, in Britain. As this autobiography shows, Mary Seacole had a sharp instinct for hypocrisy as well as a ripe taste for sarcasm. Frequently we see her joyfully rise to mock the limitations artificially imposed on her as a black woman. She emerges from her writings as an individual with a most un-Victorian...

The best-known work of a 19th century American black novelist, this book uses the conventions of the sentimental novel with the goal of effecting social change.