Mrs Seacole, a free-born Jamaican daughter of a Scottish army officer and a free black woman, recounts her childhood, her years as a storekeeper in a Central American frontier town, and her role as a battlefield `doctress' to British troops in the Crimea.
No autobiography by an Afro-American woman of the nineteenth century defies classification more than Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands (1857). A free-born Jamaican, evidently well protected from the tentacles of slavery, Mary Jane Grant Seacole did not write her narrative expressly to advance the cause of antislavery, as so many Afro-American women autobiographers did during her era.
