author
Martha Griffith Browne
1828–1906
An antislavery writer, poet, and suffragist, she turned personal conviction into action and used her voice to challenge slavery and support women's rights. Her best-known work, Autobiography of a Female Slave, remains a striking part of 19th-century American reform literature.
1 Audiobook
Autobiography of a Female Slave
by Martha Griffith Browne
About the author
Born in Kentucky in 1828, Martha "Mattie" Griffith Browne grew up in a slaveholding family but became firmly opposed to slavery. Accounts of her life note that she freed the enslaved people she inherited and helped support their transition to freedom, a choice that put her at odds with relatives and shaped her public identity as a reformer.
She is best known for Autobiography of a Female Slave (1857), a book associated with antislavery writing in the years before the Civil War. Beyond that work, she was also remembered as a poet and as an advocate for women's suffrage, linking her literary career with broader causes of social reform.
Browne later lived in Boston and remained connected to reform circles there. She died in 1906, leaving behind a life that joined literature, abolitionism, and activism in a direct and deeply personal way.