This is Orlando, a podcast about the history of women's writing from medieval times to the present. This episode is about race and belles lettres in eighteenth century America. We talk to Tara Bynum about the writer Phillis Wheatley, who also chose to be known as Phillis Peters. She was a woman who was abducted from West Africa around aged 6 or 7 in 1761 and sold into slavery in Boston. She learned to read and went on to become a well-known poetess and a free woman. In her poem “On Imagination,” she uses the heroic couplets that were typical of the eighteenth century: “We on thy pinions can surpass the wind, / And leave the rolling universe behind: / From star to star the mental optics rove, / Measure the skies, and range the realms above.”

Wheatley is best known as a poet, and it is easy to see her as the first point in a lineage of black American women poets stretching on to Amanda Gorman in the twenty-first century. But Bynum makes a compelling case for a fuller portrait of Wheatley, for seeing her as a letter writer enmeshed in late eighteenth century history, and as a person who experienced the American Revolution alongside the Founding Fathers. We discuss one of Wheatley’s letters that came to light in 2005. As a witness to the American Revolution, Wheatley fled Boston for Providence, Rhode Island shortly after the Battle of Bunker Hill in 1775. She writes to a friend in Newport, which was soon to be taken over by the British: "I doubt not that your present situation is extremely unhappy," she wrote. "Even I a mere spectator am in anxious suspense concerning the fortune of this unnatural civil contest.”

Bynum’s forthcoming book, Reading Pleasures, focuses on the ways in which figures like Wheatley found pleasure in friendship, religion, literature, and community building even in the midst of slavery and war. We talk to Bynum about what this fuller picture of Wheatley looks like, and what excites her about her writing.