This is Orlando, a podcast about the history of women's writing from medieval times to the present. This episode is about the complicated intersection of race, class, colonization and women’s writing in the mid-nineteenth century. We talk to Alisha Walters about Mary Seacole, a woman writer who was born in Jamaica and travelled to Panama and eventually the Crimea, using her medical skills, to help the soldiers whom she called “her sons”. The Crimean war, which took place from 1853 to 1856, saw England, France and Sardinia allied with the Ottoman empire against Russia. She wrote her story in the Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands, published in 1858. While Seacole’s acquaintance and contemporary, Florence Nightingale, has remained well-known since the Victorian era, Mary Seacole, a mixed race woman, was well-known and respected in the nineteenth century but has only re-emerged as an important historical figure and writer in more recent years. We talk to Walters about the reasons for Seacole’s neglect in the twentieth century, and about what excites her about Seacole and her work.
