Includes bibliographies and index.

Nine Black Women, Moira Ferguson's fascinating and informative documentation of the literary and political activities of nineteenth-century African American, Canadian, Bermudian, and Caribbean women, is a splendid addition to the library of works now recognizing the lives and voices of women of the African diaspora. A combination of biography, personal testimony, and social history, the breadth of this study opens up new perspectives on how we understand that whether they knew, or knew of each other or not, earlier black women have always engaged each other in powerful dialogue across time and space. Nine Black Women will find great significance and usefulness in a wide array of classrooms as well as in continuing efforts to excavate a complex past that rejects our marginalization and forgetfulness.

Nine Black Women is an important anthology that will greatly facilitate our study and teaching of nineteenth-century black women's writing. The selections offer us intimate--and at times poignant--glimpses into the personal lives of nine black women; but they also invite us to examine the political dimensions of the women's more public cultural, religious, and social experiences. Finally, in bringing together texts by black women from different regions in the Americas, the volume gives us a significantly new gendered account of the making of the black Atlantic.