Runaway Discourse: Women Write Slavery, Race, and Empire

Abstract

Women writers and activists had long played a vital part in extra-parliamentary campaigns to abolish first the slave trade and then slavery itself in the British colonies. The early 1830s saw the success of the latter campaign, with abolition passed in Parliament in 1833 and in force from 1 August 1834. Two key publications by women, both innovative, but very different in character, appeared in these final campaigning years. The first of these, The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave, Related by Herself (1831) was the first complete women’s slave narrative to be published in Britain, while the second, ‘Demerara’ (1833), is an early tale by Harriet Martineau (1802–76), part of her celebrated twenty-five-part popular series Illustrations of Political Economy (1832–4), which kicked off what was to be one of the most successful and varied writing careers of any nineteenth-century woman. In the preface to her tale of West Indian slavery and slaveholding, Martineau expressly distances herself from the ‘sentimental’ school of anti-slavery writing, which idealised the black subject—a tradition that went as far back as Aphra Behn’s (1640–89) Oroonoko (1688)—in order to lay out the rational economic reasons why free labour would benefit plantation owners as well as their human chattel. Mary Prince’s (1788- after 1833) narrative, published a year earlier, as ‘told to’ an anti-slavery advocate and author, Susannah Strickland (1803–85), ‘related’ her life in Bermuda, Antigua, and England, and her resistance to slavery.