During Britain’s imperial age, there was an emergence of Black writers whose publications challenged slavery and colonial rule and brought to the public, for the first time, the experiences of people of colour. Many used their voice to argue for abolition, like Mary Prince, born enslaved in Bermuda, who became the first Black woman to publish an autobiography in Britain (The History of Mary Prince, 1831); her dictated testimony gave a searing account of enslavement from a woman’s perspective that helped galvanise public opinion in the final years of the Transatlantic Traffic in Enslaved Africans. Likewise, after slavery was abolished, the Jamaican-born free woman Mary Seacole authored the first self-written memoir in 1857, Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands, which charted her travels across the world and her work as a nurse during the Crimean War.
Later writers like Cornelia Sorabji – the first woman to practice law in India and Britain – would use memoir to speak about women’s reform. For many authors of this period, writing was a tool to bear witness and challenge the dominant discourses of the time that flattened or erased the experiences of people of colour.