Mary Prince: The First Female Black Slave Biography
- Oct 18, 2025
- 6 min read
In recent years, there has been an increased interest in slave autobiographies, particularly with men such as Olaudah Equiano’s autobiography published in 1789, or the later Frederick Douglass writing about life under American slavery, who’s narrative was published in 1845. However, Mary Prince, the first woman to have her slavery story published, entitled The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave, has had her name somewhat missed in public perception.
Perhaps it has something to do with the fact the abolition campaign in Britain and the British Empire didn’t represent enslaved women until the final phase in the 1820s and 1830s, prior to the 1833 Abolition of Slavery Act and following the 1807 Abolition of the Slave Trade Act. However, this does seem to downplay the important role Mary’s story had on this final phase.
Mary Prince was born into slavery in Bermuda in 1788. She was first separated from her mother and siblings around the age of 10 or 12, something that haunted her for the rest of her life and she would mention with strong emotions in her later History of Mary Prince. From there, she was sold to various different ‘owners’ not just in Bermuda, but also Antigua and Grand Turk Island (part of the Turks and Caicos Islands). The work in Grand Turk Island involved working the salt ponds there. Due to the backbreaking work she had to endure in her life, Mary suffered from rheumatism and working the salt pans made this pain even worse.
Just as with many enslaved people, Mary was forced to carry on working despite illness, exhaustion and even injury. She would later go on to explain how often she was beaten and repeatedly whipped by these various ‘owners’. The ones we know the most about are John Adams Woods and his wife, her last ‘owners’, who were in Antigua. Mary gives vivid descriptions of their abuse towards her. Mrs Woods often was the one to whip Mary. This marked her skin and was often given as a punishment for her daring to show defiance.
Mary tried various means to gain her freedom from the Woods. She admits in her narrative that “I wanted, by all honest means to earn money to buy my freedom”. To do this, she sold coffee, and other things, to try and make money to buy her freedom. It was never enough for the Woods, who constantly refused Mary her freedom. In 1826, Mary married Daniel James, a carpenter and free black man she had met through the church she attended. It was this church that also taught her how to read. When the Woods found out Mary had married without their permission, they went crazy and had her whipped more than normal for this. Daniel had even offered to buy Mary’s freedom, but once again this was denied.
In 1828, John Adams Woods moved to London and brought Mary with him. In doing this, Mary had been forcibly separated from her husband. It’s not known if she ever was able to be reunited with him. There was one benefit that Mary could think of with this move: in England, there was supposedly no such thing as slavery, so she hoped this would finally mean freedom. In reality, the legal status of enslaved people brought to England from the colonies was ambiguous at best.
The move to England and the change in climate didn’t do Mary’s already poor health any good. She was now struggling, even more than before, to undertake the tasks she was expected to. In response, Woods threatened to throw her out on the streets with no help whatsoever. Mary saw this as her chance. She at last “took courage and resolved that I would not be longer thus treated” and she left.
Mary must have had mixed feelings at this point. It must have been a relief to finally be rid of her violent ‘owners’, but she now had to make her own way in the world. This moment was the one she’d been dreaming of for years, but now she had to face the reality of it. Thankfully, the Moravian Church she had joined whilst in the Caribbean had a Mission House in Hatton Garden and that is where she initially went to get help. They would help her gain contacts and find her somewhere more permanent to live.
Eventually, she gained paid work under Thomas Pringle, the secretary for the Anti-Slavery Society. Pringle was keen to help get Mary’s newfound freedom to be legally binding. Initially this involved trying to convince John Adams Woods to free her. He was still refusing that. When that didn’t work, Pringle directly petitioned Parliament in 1829, but this was unsuccessful as by then, Woods had returned to Antigua, meaning that was the end of the matter once more.
It was only now that Pringle decided it would be a good idea for Mary Prince to share her story in the form of a publication. It also helped that Susannah Strickland, a writer from Suffolk (although she moved to Canada later on and was then known as Susannah Strickland Moodie after a marriage), was staying with the Pringles. Mary sat down and dictated her story to Susannah in January 1831. Thomas Pringle would then go on to edit the narrative himself. He purposefully avoided doing this directly through the Anti-Slavery Society as there had been previous issues with the Society helping out individual formally enslaved people.
The work of Strickland and Pringle has meant scholars have seen this as a difficult narrative to decipher. It is true that it cannot be seen as the work of a single author, for both Strickland and Pringle gave their own viewpoint on what was needed to be included. However, in placing too much emphasis on this threatens to weaken Mary herself and what her story did to help the anti-slavery cause. Understandably though, even in the 1830s, people who consumed this History saw it either as evidence as to the brutal, violent and degrading nature of slavery, or just simply as pumped up anti-slavery propaganda. Perhaps a bit of both can be thought about too.
Mary Prince herself ended up appearing in court twice over the publication of the narrative, but not in cases brought against her. Both instead involved Thomas Pringle. The first was Thomas Pringle, who took the editor of Blackwood’s Magazine to court for libel. The magazine was highly derogatory about Pringle’s involvement with the publication, suggesting that it only came about because Pringle and Prince were having an affair. In this instance, Pringle won. However, John Adams Wood would also take Thomas Pringle to court for defamation, claiming he was being portrayed as evil. In reality, I don’t think with hindsight he could say he wasn’t. Woods won the case and was awarded £25 worth of damages, which is just under £1,700 today.
It didn’t matter then that most people against Mary’s History called into question her veracity as a storyteller, including how sexually promiscuous or not she was. She had to stand in front of both of these courts defending herself, bringing in her own witnesses to testify her own truth, despite the fact neither cases technically involved her. It was important to remember, as Mary’s own words say in the History: “I have felt what a slave feels, and I know what a slave knows; I would have all the good people in England to know it too”.
Sadly this is the last we know of Mary. These are certainly the last documented times we know she appeared in public. It’s unknown whether she later did return to the Caribbean to find her husband, or whether she stayed in England and worked in various households. Whatever really happened to her, I hope she was able to find the happiness and peace she deserved. Understandably, I can’t cover all of her life in this short post, so if you are interested, I would certainly recommend looking further into her story yourselves. Her History is still widely available as well, so perhaps that would be a good starting point.
Ryan Hanley, Beyond Slavery and Abolition: Black British Writing c. 1770-1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), p. 76.
Black History Month, ‘Mary Prince: A Life of Resilience and Rebellion’, https://www.blackhistorymonth.org.uk/article/section/history-of-slavery/mary-prince-a-life-of-resilience-and-rebellion/
Ibid
The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave (1831)
Black History Month, ‘Mary Prince: A Life of Resilience and Rebellion’
Ibid
The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave (1831)
London Museum, ‘The Life Story of Mary Prince’, https://www.londonmuseum.org.uk/collections/london-stories/the-life-story-of-mary-prince/
Ibid
Jessica L. Allen, ‘Pringle’s Pruning of Prince: The History of Mary Prince and the Question of Repetition’, Callaloo, 35.2 (2012), p. 509
Royal Museums Greenwich, ‘Who was Mary Prince?’, https://www.rmg.co.uk/stories/maritime-history/who-was-mary-prince
Ryan Hanley, Beyond Slavery and Abolition: Black British Writing c. 1770-1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), p. 93
Royal Museums Greenwich, ‘Who was Mary Prince?’
Ryan Hanley, Beyond Slavery and Abolition, p. 93
The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave (1831)
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