[AFRICAN-AMERICAN HISTORY & LITERATURE] [ELLEANOR ELDRIDGE] [MacDOUGAL, Frances Harriet (Whipple)]

Memoirs of Elleanor Eldridge

Providence: B.T. Albro, 1843. Reprint. 18mo. (13.75cm); original marbled paper-covered boards and brown cloth backstrip, with printed title label mounted to spine; vii,[8]-127,[1]pp, with engraved frontispiece. Board edges worn, with corners a bit rounded and some mild board exposure; small loss to paper at front cover, with some general aging and foxing to text; the lower third of the pictorial frontispiece has been skillfully supplied in facsimile; hinges sound; Very Good, with the title label still present.

Reprint of this 1838 memoir by Elleanor Eldridge (dates uncertain; ca 1785-1865), a free woman of color and pioneering Black entrepreneur, who was the instigator of a celebrated civil trial following the fraudulent confiscation by creditors of her substantial ($4,000) estate in Providence, Rhode Island. Though ultimately unsuccessful – Eldridge eventually was forced to buy back her own property, using proceeds from the two volumes of her memoirs which she published specifically for that purpose – this was certainly one of the earliest civil actions brought by a Black woman plaintiff against a white defendant under American law.

Being unlettered, Eldridge relied upon a "co-author," in the person of one Frances Harriet Whipple Green MacDougall, a writer on abolition and the daughter of a former employer. The result is a somewhat romanticized account of Elleanor's misadventures within the white business and legal establishment of Rhode Island, an amalgam of fact and fantasy that one historian has described as "reading like a romance novel." But despite occasional departures from fact, the AANB describes Elleanor's Memoirs as "a remarkable text about a remarkable woman, offering a celebratory depiction of an industrious, black workingwoman that contradicts negative popular understandings of black workingwomen's subordinate status...it also affirms a tradition of unlettered black women – Elizabeth Freeman in Massachusetts and Sojourner Truth in New York – who forged successful careers and marshaled their legal and social acumen to overcome racial prejudice" (AANB III:168). BLOCKSON 3367 (for the 1841 ed.). 88758.

Price: $650.00

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