When “The History of Mary Prince” was published in England in 1831, it set off a firestorm. Prince’s account of her experience as an enslaved woman in the Caribbean was the first of its kind to be published in Great Britain. It arrived at a time when the abolitionist movement was gaining more and more traction, and the vivid, brutal detail and direct prose of Prince’s story added fuel to the movement. It spawned two libel lawsuits, both of which Prince testified in, and sold out its first three printings within a year.
However, in time, Prince’s narrative was relegated to the dusty shelves of history by literary scholars who deemed it less authentic because it was dedicated by Prince, not written in her own hand. Now, with “The Cambridge Companion to Mary Prince,” a new edited volume of scholarship focused entirely on Prince’s narrative, a Northeastern University professor hopes to thrust this landmark text back into the spotlight.
“She documents that she has these really awful, terrible experiences but still at every opportunity she’s trying to better herself,” says Nicole Aljoe, an English professor at Northeastern and editor of the new Cambridge Companion. “She’s trying to achieve liberty in some way, shape or form.”
