Phillis Wheatley

Starred review from September 5, 2011
In this first full-length biography of “the mother of African-American literature,” Carretta (Equiano, the African) offers a thoroughly readable, fully scholarly life of Wheatley (c. 1761–1784). Precise data about the roughly seven-year-old child, born in Senegal and transported into slavery in Massachusetts, who became a “pioneer of American and African literature,” is hard to come by, but this is a satisfying study of the “elusive” Wheatley, fleshed out with succinct, discerning readings of the body of her work, from a recently discovered poem composed when she was about 11 to her last known work. Carretta unveils the truly remarkable figure Wheatley was, as a highly literate, woman in colonial America, and, through a detailed assessment of her revisions and her correspondence, as the highly conscious poet she became. Especially noteworthy is the book’s attentiveness to Wheatley’s involvement in the production and promotion of her book, the contemporary responses to her work, and an unprecedented account of her marriage to the debt-ridden John Peters, whose death forced her into domestic service. That some of Carretta’s analyses and conjectures may spark debate only adds to the liveliness of his worthy, welcome biography.

September 1, 2011

Carretta (English/Univ. of Maryland; Equiano, the African, 2005) returns with an examination of the life of a woman of whom little is known but whom the author and literary history have crowned as the mother of African-American literature.

The author struggles mightily to add flesh to the skeletal structure of Phillis Wheatley's (1753–1784) story. He tells us about the slave ship that brought her, when she was about 7, from Africa, as well as some general history about the Wheatleys, who purchased her then freed her at the urging of her supporters in England, where she had published her only volume, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, in 1773. Carretta supplies as much as he can about her life before she began writing, the effects of her poetry, her minor celebrity in England (where her volume earned some respectful but sometimes patronizing reviews; scholars have found no American reviews) and her relationships with George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, John Paul Jones and others. The author also discusses the man she later married, John Peters, whose financial troubles might have caused her virtual disappearance for a few years near the end of her life. She floated proposals for a second volume of verse, but circumstance denied her. Carretta speculates that she might have had a better life if she had stayed in England, where she traveled with a Wheatley on business in 1773. In London, she discovered an intellectual and personal freedom unknown to those of her race (and gender) in America. But too often the slim record forces Carretta to employ words like probably and likely, to substitute historical and cultural backgrounds for biographical fact and to tell us about other people only tangentially involved.

Even this most resolute, thorough excavation cannot uncover what is no longer there. Still, this is the most complete biography available, and no one is likely to find out much more of consequence about Wheatley.

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September 1, 2011

West African-born Phillis Wheatley (1753?-84) was sold into slavery and became the property of a wealthy Boston family at the age of eight. In 1773, she published Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, becoming the first person of African heritage and only the second woman to publish a book in America. Although she is the subject of several studies, e.g., Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s The Trials of Phillis Wheatley, this is surprisingly the first full biography of her. Carretta (English, Univ. of Maryland; Equiano, the African) presents his significant research in this comprehensive study of Wheatley. He uncovered her previously unknown earliest writings in the personal papers of a contemporary. Using court documents about her husband, John Peters, Carretta found new information about Wheatley's postemancipation life in Boston and London, years about which scholars still know very little. He also provides fresh analysis of Wheatley's poetry and gives the reader a glimpse into the lives of both free and enslaved blacks in Colonial New England. VERDICT Recommended for both scholars and lay readers interested in African American history, the early history of the United States, and Wheatley's place in American literature.--Jason Martin, Univ. of Central Florida Lib., Orlando

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