Lucy Terry Prince remains fairly obscure, Phillis Wheatley has been acknowledged for her role as one of the earliest women writers in America. She is, in fact, generally regarded as the first Black woman writer, and, after Anne Bradstreet, the second woman writer in America. A poet, her verse expresses guarded pride about her “sable race” and includes a subtle treatment of the subject of slavery, though her letters expressed her strong feelings about it. She called herself “Africa’s Muse” in her Hymn to Humanity.
Her story and Lucy’s began the same way: Phillis was kidnapped by slave traders in Africa as a child, and, along with as many as eighty other young girls, she was transported by ship from Senegal, brought to the port of Boston, and sold into slavery in 1761.
Phillis’ fortunes were a bit better than those of many others as she was purchased by a kind-hearted woman, Susannah Wheatley, who took pity on the forlorn child wrapped in a dirty scrap of carpeting. Phillis’s price was a bargain; the Wheatleys, guessing her to be around seven years old because of missing front teeth, took her into their home on King Street and gave her their last name, as was the practice with slaves.
The Wheatleys noticed how curious and alert Phillis was and judged her to be of exceptional intelligence. When she tried to write on the wall, their teenaged daughter, Mary Wheatley, started to teach Phillis in earnest. At the end of a year’s time, Phillis was reading and writing with ease and had also learned, according to her master’s recollection, a “little astronomy, some ancient and modern geography, a little ancient history, a fair knowledge of the Bible, and a thoroughly appreciative acquaintance with the most important Latin classics, especially the works of Virgil and Ovid.” Phillis became, again in his words, “one of the most highly educated young women in Boston,” and went on to study and translate Latin. Indeed, one of her interpretations of a Latin tale by Ovid was published.
She also liked to compose verse and loved the brilliantly crafted poetry of Alexander Pope, whom she took as her model. In 1767, fourteen-year-old Phillis wrote the first of many occasional poems, “To the University of Cambridge,” thirty-two blank verses of counsel for college boys. The Wheatleys proved to be generous to the girl and encouraged her to pursue her poetics, providing her with paper and pen in case of sudden inspiration. Phillis had a delicate constitution and was only allowed to perform light chores such as dusting and polishing.
One of her occasional poems, “On the Death of the Reverend Mr. George Whitefield,” brought her to the eyes of the world when it appeared on a broadside printed in Boston in 1770, which was then reprinted throughout the colonies and in England. Her story was sensationalized as the work of “a servant girl…but nine years in this country from Africa.” She was ushered into literary and social circles she would normally have been forbidden to enter, though because of her slave status, she was not allowed to dine at her hosts’ tables.
In 1772, Phillis considered the prospects of collecting her poems into a volume, and the ever-supportive John Wheatley sent a manuscript and a letter of introduction and biographical information to Archibald Bell in London. Bell and the Countess of Huntingdon, to whom he had shown Phillis’s poems, doubted that an African girl had really written the work and required the testament of no fewer than eighteen prominent Bostonians.
Meanwhile, Phillis’s health weakened, and the Wheatleys reasoned that a trip abroad might bolster her. Accompanied by Nathaniel Wheatley, Mary’s twin, who was on a business trip, Phillis set out to London, where she was an immediate cause célèbre, thanks to an introduction into society provided by the Countess of Huntingdon. She was fèted and flattered in a land free from slavery. According to one account, “Thoughtful people praised her; titled people dined her; and the press extolled the name of Phillis Wheatley, the African poetess.” Her single published book, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, came out in 1773 and was dedicated to none other than the countess. Complete with a portrait of Phillis holding a quill pen drawn by slave artist and poet Scipio Moorhead, it contained thirty-nine poems.
The following year, Susannah Wheatley, the only mother figure Phillis had known in the land of her captors, died. With the Revolutionary War impending, Phillis wrote a letter to General George Washington, who was impressed by the “elegant lines” of her missive and invited her to be received by him and his officers. When John Wheatley passed away, Phillis was set free.
She married a Boston grocer a month later, a handsome free black man who claimed to have worked as a lawyer and physician as well as merchant. His looks and talent are said to have led him to a degree of “arrogance” and “disdain” for work, which allegedly saw the newlyweds into poverty. Two of their three children died, and Phillis labored at a cheap boarding house to support herself and the remaining child. At thirty-one, she died, followed almost immediately in death by her child. They were buried together in a location that remains unknown. The last attention the “African poetess” received for her writing talent was for a poem she wrote about the death of her baby son, published in 1784 in the Boston magazine. This was one of several compositions from the last part of her life, all set to be published in honor of Benjamin Franklin, to whom she had dedicated the book. The manuscript disappeared along with all trace of Phillis Wheatley’s work as a mature poet.
Imagination! Who can sing thy force? Or who describe the swiftness of thy course?
Phillis Wheatley
HARRIET E. ADAMS WILSON provocateur
Like many other literary women, Harriet Wilson was also left out of history books. She was the first Black woman to publish a novel in English and the first Black person, male or female, to publish a novel in America.
Sadly, we know precious little about this author. Harriet E. Adams Wilson is believed to have been born in Fredericksburg, Virginia, in 1807 or 1808 and trained in millinery as her trade; she was then deserted and left in poverty by her sailor husband, who impregnated her before the abandonment. Her son from this relationship, George Mason Wilson, died at age seven, a year after the publication of the one novel it is known that Wilson wrote.
Her groundbreaking work, Our Nig, a title deliberately chosen for its challenge and daring, was printed by George C. Rand and Avery of Boston. It is believed Wilson self-published Our Nig to prove a political point, as evidenced by the full title, Our Nig, or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black, in A Two-Story White House, North, Showing That Slavery’s Shadows Fall Even There, with the author credit to “Our Nig.”
Our Nig was ignored by reviewers and readers and barely sold. Wilson’s work was in the dustbin of lost history until Henry Louis Gates, Jr., discovered it and reissued it in 1983. Gates observed that the provocative title probably contributed to the novel’s near oblivion. The plot, a marriage between a white woman and a Black man, would have alienated many readers.
Example rendered her words efficacious. Day by day there was a manifest change of deportment toward “Nig.”
Harriet E. Adams Wilson
SARA TEASDALE parting the shadows
Poet Sara Teasdale, known now for the evocative intensity of her language, was brought up in the truest Victorian tradition in the late 1880s in St. Louis, Missouri. She was pampered and protected, but like a hothouse flower starved for light, felt smothered by her parents’ watchful restrictions. Imaginative and sensitive, Sara found her only solace in writing. In 1907, when she was twenty-three, Reedy’s Mirror, a St. Louis weekly paper, published her work for the first time.
By age twenty-six, she was desperate to break free of the hampering bonds of dependency on her parents. The only way she could manage this was to marry. She didn’t find the prospects particularly appealing, but it seemed preferable to her stifling life at home.
Her
