The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (Bedford Series in History and Culture)

Rating:
Summary: caveat emptor
Review: Prospective buyers of Mr. Allison's edition of Equiano's autobiography should be advised that although Mr. Allison says that his "edition follows the first American printing . . . (New York, 1791)" and that "the only significant changes . . . are the insertion of paragraph breaks and notes to the text," Mr. Allison does not warn the reader that he's silently combined parts of various editions of the autobiography to form a book Equiano himself never published. For example, if you compare the next-to-the-last paragraph (p. 195), in which Equiano mentions his marriage, to the passage on page 187, where he says his hand is free, you might get the impression that he's saying he's available for adultery or bigamy. But the fault lies not in Equiano, who changed the earlier passage after he added the paragraph about his marriage in 1792. What Mr. Allison gives us is his text, not Equiano's. And he might have mentioned that the New York edition was published without Equiano's knowledge or permission. Readers should also not assume that all "facts" given are true. For example, on page 21, Gronniosaw's book was published in 1772 (not 1770), Marrant's in 1785 (not 1790), and Equiano died on 31 March 1797 (not in April).

Rating:
Summary: Response to Robert Allison
Review: The 1772 publication date of Gronniosaw's _Narrative_ seems to have been recently established by Vincent Carretta in _Unchained Voices: An Anthology of Black Authors in the English-Speaking World of the 18th Century_ (Kentucky, 1996), with the evidence offered on pp. 53-54. The post-1791 editions in which Equiano understandably deletes the wording "My hand is ever free--if any female Debonair wishes to obtain it" after his April 7, 1792 marriage to Susanna Cullen are the 5th (Edinburgh, 1792), the 6th & 7th (both London, 1793), the 8th (Norwich, 1794), and the 9th and last (London, 1794). My source for this information is Vincent Carretta's authoritative Penguin edition of Equiano's _Interesting Narrative_ (1995), pp. 297-297, note 633. A reader from Virginia