Sexual Violence in History: A Bibliography

»Mary Prince (c. 1 October 1788 – after 1833) was the first black woman to publish an autobiography of her experience as a slave, born in the colony of Bermuda to an enslaved family of African descent. After being sold a number of times and being moved around the Caribbean, she was brought to England as a servant in 1828, and later left her enslaver.
Prince was illiterate, but while she was living in London she dictated her life story to Susanna Strickland, a young lady living in the home of Thomas Pringle, secretary of the Society for the Mitigation and Gradual Abolition of Slavery Throughout the British Dominions (aka Anti-Slavery Society, 1823–1838). Strickland wrote down her slave narrative which was published as The History of Mary Prince in 1831, the first account of the life of a Black enslaved woman to be published in the United Kingdom. This first-hand description of the brutalities of enslavement, published at a time when slavery was still legal in Bermuda and British Caribbean colonies, had a galvanising effect on the British anti-slavery movement. It was reprinted twice in its first year.« (Extract from: Wikipedia)

K e y w o r d s

I. Chronological Index: Medieval History: 19^th Century

II. Geographical Index: European History: English History

III. Topical Index: Types: Circumstances: Sexual Threat; Victims: Slave Rape

B i b l i o g r a p h y

Primary Sources

Secondary Sources

I. Author Index

[Info] Feuerstein, Anna. »The History of Mary Prince and the Racial Formation of Rape Culture.« Nineteenth Century Gender Studies 16.2 (2020).

[Info] Thierauf, Doreen. »Spectacularly Conceived: Sexual Violence and Burdened Motherhood in Nineteenth-Century British Literature. Ph.D. Thesis, University of North Carolina, 2017.

II. Speaker Index

[Info] Thierauf, Doreen. »‘All Blood and Bruises’: Disentangling Rape and Silence in The History of Mary Prince (1831).« Taking Liberties: Sex, Pleasure, Coercion (1748-1928). Newcastle upon Tyne 2012.

[Info] Thierauf, Doreen. »Spectacularly Conceived: Sexual Violence and Burdened Motherhood in The History of Mary Prince and Aurora Leigh.« 48^th Annual Convention of the Northeast Modern Language Association. Baltimore 2017.

[Info] Thierauf, Doreen. »Uneasy Collectives: Reading Sexual Threat in Fanny Burney’s The Wanderer alongside The History of Mary Prince.« 34^th Annual 18th- and 19th-Century British Women Writers Conference. Auburn 2026.