Mary Seacole

01 January 1805 - 14 May 1881

Standard Name: Seacole, Mary

Birth Name: Mary Jane Grant

Nickname: "Mother" Seacole

Nickname: "Auntie" Seacole

Married Name: Mary Jane Seacole

MS 's single publication, the travel narrative Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands, 1857, presents a complex self-portrait of a mixed-race itinerant female colonial subject, as well as a rare female account of the Crimean War.

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Connections

Connections Sort descending	Author name	Excerpt
Friends, Associates	Frances Isabella Duberly	FIDmade friends with almost all hands of the Shooting Star, on which she sailed to the Crimea, and they gathered to cheer her as she left the ship at Varna. Duberly, Frances Isabella. Mrs Duberly’s War. Journals and Letters from the Crimea, 1854-6. Editor Kelly, Christine, Oxford University Press, 2007. 19 (She also mentions...
Intertextuality and Influence	Jane Williams	In offering an alternative to the official account of the war and the hagiography surrounding Nightingale , as well as in seeking to improve the material circumstances of its subject, the book resembles that of...
Intertextuality and Influence	Zadie Smith	This is Smith's first novel told in the first person, the narrator a North Londoner who is never named, the daughter of an obsessively self-educating and self-improving black Jamaican mother (who gets elected to parliament...
Other Life Event	Christina Rossetti	Her age and inexperience told against her. (These were reasonable objections, quite different, as Jan Marsh observes, from the racist grounds to which Mary Seacole attributed her own rejection for the same work at the...
Publishing	Andrea Levy	AL reviews for the Sunday Times, where she observed that Sara Salih 's annotated edition of The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands (Penguin 2005) would make a great film. It was...
Textual Features	Bernardine Evaristo	An odd couple on holiday from England (Stanley Williams, his Jamaican immigrant parents' my-son-the-banker, and Jessie O'Donnell, a singer, a foundling raised by nuns in Leeds) drive haphazardly across Europe towards the Middle East...
Textual Production	Kate Marsden	Fifty-five pages long, the book comprised KM 's attempt to meet and dispel the many malicious calumnies levelled at her at the time when On Sledge and Horseback was published. Chapman, Hilary. “The New Zealand Campaign against Kate Marsden, Traveller to Siberia”. New Zealand Slavonic Journal, 2000, pp. 123-40. 134-5 As in her earlier...
Textual Production	Andrea Levy	Texts that she mentions using for research include Mary Prince 's autobiography, Lady Nugent 's journal, Matthew Lewis 's Journal of a Residence among the Negroes in the West Indies, Mary Seacole 's Wonderful...

Timeline

September 1854

The British landed in Crimea, unopposed by the Russians they had come to make war with. They went on to lay siege to Sebastopol that October and to win important victories at Balaklava (25...

September 1855

Sebastopol finally fell, helping to bring the Crimean War to a close.

Mitchell, Sally, editor. Victorian Britain: An Encyclopedia. Garland Press, 1988.

202-3

1866

The Royal Society of Arts established a scheme (believed to be the first in the world) for setting up commemorative plaques on buildings associated with famous people.

Quinn, Ben. “Plaque blues. Cuts hit heritage scheme”. Guardian Weekly, 11 Jan. 2013, p. 16.

Texts

Andrews, William L., and Mary Seacole. “Introduction”. Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands, Oxford University Press, 1988, p. xxvii - xxxiv.

Seacole, Mary. Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands. J. Blackwood, 1857.

Seacole, Mary. Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands. Editors Alexander, Ziggi and Audrey Dewjee, Falling Wall Press, 1984.

Seacole, Mary, and William L. Andrews. Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands. Oxford University Press, 1988.