This chapter explores the questions and insights that the digital humanities and Mary Prince can offer each other. With its complex interplay of authorial and editorial agencies, The History of Mary Prince reveals key challenges for several major modes of digital scholarship: developing accurate but scalable digital models, aligning computational methods with humanities research questions, and curating textual collections for study and analysis. This chapter offers a case study with the Women Writers Project’s edition of The History of Mary Prince to outline both the new potentials and the thorny questions that arise in research with digital editions. Working with a digital model, scholars can examine the text at many levels and in contexts that range from other personal narratives to hundreds of works of pre-Victorian women’s writing. The case study focuses on how Prince and the other writers who contributed to The History engage with gender, with authorial and editorial agency, and with the representation of persons – but this is only the beginning of what is possible for Prince and the digital humanities.

Critics often debate the authenticity of authorial voice in The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave Narrative, Related by Herself. They argue that external influences and pressures either obscure or completely override Prince’s agency as the first-person narrator. However, a close analysis of the text reveals distinct hallmarks of Prince’s personal voice in her autobiography. As many valences of that personal voice are manifested, Prince illuminates across her narrative not only the historical experience of the enslaved but also the power of testimony to change the surrounding culture.

The approach to reading the array of texts that now constitute the editions of The History of Mary Prince is both historical and literary critical, attentive to Caribbean and British evangelical contexts and the practices and vocabularies of Christian religious denominations. The interdisciplinary and archival reach of the reading of Mary Prince’s spiritual worlds deepens understandings of her plural religious identity, as well as the meanings of Moravianism and Christianity in her experience as represented in The History and its reception. The chapter demonstrates the connective role of readers and researchers in extending the contexts in which she is remembered and in drawing out more fully the provenances of supplementary historical materials in recent editions of The History.

This chapter reads Mary Prince’s History within a Black Atlantic context of Black print and activism to connect the abolitionist work of enslaved and free Black people across the Caribbean, North America, and Britain. Mary Prince’s testimony creates abolitionist futures too, linking past and present through transatlantic Black networks of resistance and print. The legacies of abolitionist arguments made by Prince, Belinda Sutton, Olaudah Equiano, Grace Jones, Ottobah Cugoano, and many others are shown to be of vital importance today as we seek pathways out of ongoing racial capitalist violence.

This chapter considers how we might situate Mary Prince in the history of Black British life in the early nineteenth century. It examines how Prince’s narrative fits into a wider tradition of Black British writing, paying special attention to how her story compares to the writings of other Black Britons from the same period and to Prince’s unique insights as the first Black British woman to share her story of starting a new life in London. Considering the narrative’s status as a highly edited and controlled text, created by Prince alongside Thomas Pringle and Susanna Strickland, this chapter also analyzes the ways Prince might have been limited in what she could say about her experiences as a Black British immigrant, especially with respect to her potential connections to other Black Britons. Therefore, the chapter purposely puts pressure on the narrative’s tendency to depict Prince in isolation from other Black people during her time in London, inviting readers to reconsider how we might imagine Prince’s relationship to a wider Black British community.

This chapter argues that through narrating the specific experiences of enslaved women and their freedom practices, from alternative kinship practices and strategic sexual relationships to knowledge of the slave economy and its reproductive logic, The History of Mary Prince imagines future freedoms while critiquing white inhumanity and the place of enslaved women within slavery’s rape culture. The chapter examines how enslaved women created and held onto kinship; how they used their sexuality to navigate their confinement and challenge ownership over their bodies; how Prince critiques white supremacy and its practices, including rape culture and the inability of white people to have sympathy for the enslaved; and how Prince imagined future freedoms, such as moving back to Antigua as a free woman, and freedom for all enslaved people. Through this analysis the chapter argues that Prince’s narrative challenges the silence of the colonial archive and allows us to see enslaved women beyond the violence they faced.

This chapter analyzes how Prince’s text underscores her disabilities and illnesses resulting from the physical, emotional, and psychological abuse she encountered and the labor she performed in both enslaved and free legal situations across geopolitical locations. Her memoir also moves between past and present tenses, active and passive voices. Through these literary techniques, she emphasizes disability and mobility as hardship as well as means of acquiring agency within the legal and everyday restrictions and demands people in power in the Caribbean and Britain placed on her in daily life. Prince’s intervention in the slave narrative genre as the first-known woman-authored autobiography in the genre widens interpretative terrain about Black enslavement and freedom, as she draws our attention to her physicality, disability, movement, and agency as a woman.

With its supporting materials and explanatory footnotes added to the transcribed narrative, The History of Mary Prince resembles a bundle of legal documents. This was no accident: Thomas Pringle sought to intervene in the public debate about Caribbean slavery by publishing a trustworthy, firsthand account of its horrors. Yet the relationship of The History to legal matters was not only metaphorical, and two legal suits followed its publication, both for libel. The first was brought by Pringle himself in response to an attack in print by James MacQueen, a trenchant defender of British slavery. The second suit was brought by Prince’s former enslaver John Adams Wood, who claimed that Pringle had libeled him in the first place in The History. Prince appeared as a witness in both trials, and her testimony during the second trial provides an additional source of information about her life. With extracts from The History and MacQueen’s article read aloud in both trials, the court thus became a significant site for Prince and the continuing “trials” that she faced during her life.