Sojourner Truth

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Standard Name: Truth, Sojourner
Birth Name: Isabella Hardenbergh
Self-constructed Name: Isabella Van Wagener
Self-constructed Name: Sojourner Truth
Nickname: Bell
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.
Black and white photo of Sojourner Truth, wearing wire spectacles, a white cap, long, dark, long-sleeved dress, and a white shawl. She sits beside a small table with a vase of flowers on it, holding a half-done piece of knitting. She regularly used small, carte-de-visite photos to publicize her cause, under the slogan: “I Sell the Shadow to Support the Substance.”

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Intertextuality and Influence Gillian Allnutt
The collection's title-poem (Sojourner), the first of the last section, is a reference to the African-American preacher Sojourner Truth who fought for the rights of Black women. This association is somewhat unclear in...
Textual Production Gillian Allnutt
GA 's poetry volume Sojourner was published with recommendations from Helen Dunmore among others.
Blackwell’s Online Bookshop.
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Harriet Beecher Stowe
She also published articles in the Atlantic Monthly between 1857 and 1879. She wrote of slavery and emancipation, and of domestic topics. Her Sojourner Truth . The Libyan Sybil appeared in April 1963, and The...

Timeline

By December 1981
Afro-American feminist bell hooks (born Gloria Jean Watkins ) followed her first poetry collection with the first of her important works of feminist theory, Ain't I a Woman?: Black Women and Feminism.