Phillis Wheatley

Phillis Wheatley (1753-1784) is an American poet and former enslaved person best known today for her Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (London: A. Bell, 1773). Mary Steele had seen the volume by late October 1773 during her visit to Yeovil. ‘Miss Jenny [Jane Attwater] had a Letter from you Yesterday’, William Steele writes to his daughter at Yeovil on 3 November 1773, ‘The lines from Miss Phillis (to be sure she is Miss now) are very extraordinary & ’tis indeed wonderful that Genius tho’ uncultivated shou’d shine amidst slavery & distress’ (see volume 3, letter 35). Whether Mary Steele purchased the book of poems in Yeovil or Scott first purchased it and showed it to Steele during her stay in Somerset is unclear. In any case, both young ladies were eager to peruse any book by a female poet, in England or America, as soon as it appeared in the press, and, in this case, were especially eager to read the poetry of Wheatley, for the Steele-Scott-Attwater coterie were strong supporters of abolition. The speed in which they obtained a copy of Wheatley’s Poems speaks not only to their tenaciousness in acquiring literary works but also to their ability, as daughters of well-to-do gentry, to purchase relatively expensive books published in London and the availability of those books on the shelves of bookshops in the West Country in 1773.