‘Many people have also traced to my Scotch blood that energy and activity […] I am sure I do not know what it is to be indolent.’1 Enterprising, adventurous and brave — Mary Seacole’s autobiography, Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands (1857), presents a narrator-protagonist who works hard to conform to the conventions of Victorian autobiography. This conformity was at odds with her starkly unconventional life.Mary Seacole grew up in Jamaica in the early 1800s, the daughter of a Scottish father and Jamaican mother. Seacole credits her mother with teaching her medical skills, including the use of herbs to treat tropical diseases. Seacole gained a reputation for caring for sick European military visitors after losing her husband in the late 1840s. By the 1850s, she had joined efforts to treat outbreaks of yellow fever and cholera in Panama and Jamaica.When the Crimean War broke out in 1853, Seacole first travelled to London. She attempted to enlist in Florence Nightingale’s nursing ranks without success due to a late application to join British nurses in Crimea. Seacole herself attributed her rejection to racial prejudice. Travelling to Crimea on her own resources, Seacole set up what became known as the British Hotel in Balaklava, Crimea with Thomas Day (a relative of her husband). In addition to serving as a general store and restaurant, the British Hotel was also, as she put it, ‘a mess-table and comfortable quarters for sick and convalescent officers’2 where she would treat British soldiers dying from cholera. Seacole returned to England in 1856 at the war’s conclusion virtually penniless and was declared bankrupt. In England, with Queen Victoria in mid-reign, autobiographical writing had grown popular, with John Stuart Mill’s Autobiography (1873) and John Henry Newman, Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1864) being notable successes.In the early chapters of her autobiography, Seacole attempts to overcome her unconventional route to medicine (which was through her mother’s knowledge of traditional medicine), subtly proving her scientific knowledge through anecdotes. On a trip to Panama, she jokes that her ‘delicate light blue dress […] from its contact with the Gatun clay, looked as red as if, in the pursuit of science, I had passed it through a strong solution of muriatic acid.’3 Seacole presents her narrator-protagonist as brave and capable, likening the cholera outbreak in Panama to the ‘almost as fearful scenes on the Crimean peninsula among British men’.4 She says she had an ‘uncontrollable impulse to run out into the stormy night, and free from this plague-spot. But the weak feeling vanished’5. She emphasises her selflessness knowing that ‘the great majority of my patients had nothing better to give their doctress than thanks.’6 In Crimea, she says of the soldiers ‘their calling me ‘mother’ was not, I think, altogether unmeaning […] there was something homely in the word; and, reader, you cannot think how dear to them was the smallest thing that reminded them of home.’7 Seacole legitimises her maternal relationship with the injured soldiers and, by proxy of their gratitude, her loyalty to Britain.Although the Victorian literary scene was evolving (more women were writing autobiographies by the late 1870s, including Magaret Oliphant and Harriet Martineau), Seacole’s autobiography was the first written by a black woman in Britain when it was published in 1857.Seacole’s self portrayal is motivated by an acute awareness of her marginalised position in Victorian society. Victorian autobiographies called for heroes in narratives who strived for personal progress,8 and her loyal and driven narrator-protagonist is one that would be palatable to her readership — which at that time was largely white and upper class. Through this portrayal, she was effectively seeking to create ‘the conditions which would authorize her voice.’9Despite conforming to Victorian autobiographical conventions, Seacole’s circumstances threaten to delegitimise her voice. She was a black woman on the fringes of Victorian society in financial distress; she ultimately writes from a socially marginalised position — not a mainstream one.While Seacole’s autobiography struggles to conform to Victorian conventions, WH Russell’s confidence of her status in her own lifetime has weathered the test of time, writing in the preface to her book ‘I should have thought that no preface would have been required to introduce Mrs Seacole to the British public’10. A 21st-century resurgence in Seacole’s legacy has meant that she has been remembered through sculpture, in theatre, in opera, and in the British primary school curriculum.