In Search of Mary Seacole: The Making of a Cultural Icon

Historian Rappaport (After the Romanovs) delivers a doggedly researched biography of Mary Seacole, née Grant (c. 1805–1881), the Jamaican woman whose roles as caregiver, nurse, and shopkeeper during the Crimean War made her famous. Born to a mixed-race woman and a white Scottish soldier, Seacole learned homeopathic medicine and the boardinghouse business from her mother. Widowed less than a decade after her marriage to a white West India Company employee, Seacole ran lodging houses and restaurants in Jamaica and Panama, putting her medical skills to good use during cholera epidemics in both places. Upon learning of Florence Nightingale’s work in Crimea, Seacole offered her services to the British military and aid organizations but was rebuffed. Undeterred, she teamed up with a business acquaintance from Panama to open a store, restaurant, and medical clinic for British troops and their allies near Balaclava. Extolled by the British press, she earned several medals in recognition of her work. After the war, though, she struggled to support herself—despite publishing a bestselling memoir—and eventually fell into obscurity. Rappaport, who discovered a lost portrait of Seacole in 2002 (it now hangs in the National Portrait Gallery), skillfully delineates the racial and gendered dynamics of the period, making clear just how extraordinary Seacole’s achievements were. The result is a fitting tribute to woman long denied her due. Illus. (Sept.)