The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave

The work is a first‑person account in which Mary Prince tells her own story, recorded soon after she escaped bondage. It opens with the bright days of her childhood in Bermuda, living with the family of Miss Betsey Williams, where she was treated more like a sister than property. Those early moments of play and affection stand in stark contrast to the harsher treatment she later endures under a cruel master. As the narrative moves forward, the tone shifts, revealing the growing weight of labor and oppression.

The editor has kept Prince’s distinctive phrasing, so listeners hear her voice almost directly, unsoftened by later retellings. An appended narrative from Asa‑Asa, a captured African, broadens the perspective and links her experience to the wider Atlantic slave trade. Together they provide a vivid, personal window onto the lived reality of enslaved people in the West Indies during the early 1800s.