Sojourner Truth

ST , a charismatic religious and political leader (Christian revivalist, abolitionist, and feminist) in the northern states of the USA in the mid-nineteenth century, dictated her life story, a spiritual autobiography or slave narrative, to a literate transcriber in 1850. Her texts are problematic because of the other voices (voices of literate white well-wishers) which interpose themselves between author and reader. Her art was oral; she was a speaker and preacher rather than a writer (though her works include poetry as well as speeches). As a celebrity in her lifetime, she was much observed and written about, but her transcribers mostly seem to have succumbed to the temptation of fairly radical editing.