I Shall Make No Excuse: The Narrative Odyssey of Mary Seacole

Abstract

I shall make no excuse to my readers for giving them a pretty full history of my struggles to become a Crimean heroine! (76) says Mary Seacole in her travel book, Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands. This statement encapsulates project of her entire work. While Wonderful Adventures was marketed as a travel book, a genre enjoying high popularity at time, it was in fact, a kind of autobiography in which Seacole, conscious of audience expectations, employed sophisticated rhetorical strategies to establish herself as a perfect Victorian heroine. Since Seacole presents herself in her text as unmarried, childless, not overtly Protestant (except in her disdain for Catholicism), not English, and not white, this is an impressive literary feat. Seacole succeeded brilliantly. Not only did Wonderful Adventures become an overnight success in Great Britain, going into its second printing within a year of its first publication in 1857, but Seacole made enough money from profits to live well after returning from Crimea virtually bankrupt. Since Seacole needed to earn money from her book she adopted pose of travel writer, and in this case, 'lady' travel writer, in order to achieve these goals. In Transatlantic Manners Christopher Mulvey explains obstacles travel writers needed to negotiate to publish. He compares travel literature to fiction, claiming the most pervasive fiction constructed by nineteenth-century travel writer was that of gentility of writer and