Prince's plight was taken up by the secretary of the Anti-Slavery Society and abolitionist writer Thomas Pringle. Adams Wood refused to grant her freedom or to sell her to another who would grant her freedom. Therefore, Prince was technically free in England, but she could not return to her husband and home in Antigua without being re-enslaved unless John Adams Wood emancipated her. Although it had been made illegal to transport slaves out of England, through a loophole in the law, slavery itself was not illegal.

Whilst travelling in England Prince came into conflict with John Adams Wood and left his service. In 1828 John Adams Wood and his family travelled to London, bringing Prince with them. By the time Prince reached the age of 27, she had been sold on four separate occasions, the last to John Adams Wood, an Antiguan landowner.

Mary Prince was born to an enslaved family of African descent in Bermuda, 1788. It is important to explore the complexity of authorship in the formation of this instrumental text. It could be argued that the text reveals as much about contemporary Britain, as slavery in the West Indies. Historians hotly debate how much of the narrative is Prince’s authentic experience and how much has been edited to appeal to a specific abolitionist audience. Although this narrative is described as an autobiography, Prince herself was not literate, she relied heavily on her editors Thomas Pringle and Susannah Strickland. This account was important in the campaign to abolish the slave system. Published in 1831, The History of Mary Prince was the first published account of the life of a black woman in the United Kingdom. Nowhere is this more evident than in Mary Prince’s autobiography, a shocking first person account of the horrors of slavery experienced by Prince, as she was bought and sold between slave-'owners'. However, Black abolitionist writing was rarely left untouched by contemporary editors. Representations of slavery did important work in the argument for abolition. An Assessment of The History of Mary Prince as an Abolitionist text

The history of mary prince book