The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley: A Poet's Journeys through American Slavery and Independence by David Waldstreicher (review)

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• The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley: A Poet's Journeys through American Slavery and Independence by David Waldstreicher
• Vincent Carretta (bio)

The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley: A Poet's Journeys through American Slavery and Independence
david waldstreicher
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023
480 pp.

The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley: A Poet's Journeys through American Slavery and Independence, by David Waldstreicher, Distinguished Professor of History at CUNY, is both timely and necessary. Timely because his is one of two biographies published during the 250th anniversary of Wheatley Peters's annus mirabilis, the year in which she both published Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral and gained her freedom; necessary because of Cornelia H. Dayton's most significant biographical discoveries about her later life and marriage found since the publication in 2011 of the first full-length biography of the poet (Dayton, "Lost Years Recovered: John Peters and Phillis Wheatley Peters in Middleton," New England Quarterly, vol. 94, 2021). Waldstreicher's biography is also a major contribution to the recent fictional, critical, pedagogical, and scholarly attention Wheatley Peters has received in Honorée Fannone Jeffers's imaginative biography in verse, The Age of Phillis (Wesleyan UP, 2020); a special issue of Early American Literature (vol. 57, no. 3, 2022); a new attribution argument by Wendy Raphael Roberts (Early American Literature, vol. 58, no. 1, 2023); my revised edition of The Writings of Phillis Wheatley Peters [End Page 154] (Oxford UP, 2024); and my revised Phillis Wheatley Peters: Biography of a Genius in Bondage (U of Georgia P, 2023).

By publishing The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley with a nonacademic press, Waldstreicher will make more widely available a portrait of Wheatley Peters and her times familiar to the readers of Early American Literature who have followed the biographical, critical, and editorial work on her published in more academic venues during the past few decades, especially in the last dozen years. Waldstreicher graciously acknowledges that his biography of Wheatley Peters is based on the earliest edition of my own, as well as on my editions of her writings. Waldstreicher's view of Wheatley Peters, too, is that she is a skillful rhetorician and commentator claiming her place—subtly, when necessary, more overtly whenever possible—at the center rather than the margins of the literary, political, and social worlds in which she finds herself. She's a savvy businesswoman who exerts as much control over her life as she can, given her race, age, gender, and social status.

Waldstreicher's endnotes alone are worth the price of admission. Approximately half the number of the total words in The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley, his endnotes virtually constitute a literature review of the previous work done on Wheatley Peters by others, as well as by Waldstreicher himself. He proves himself to be a thoughtful and discriminating judge of his predecessors' contributions. Waldstreicher complements his extensive survey of Wheatleyiana with some additional historical contexts for her life and writings. The greatest strength of his biography may be his many very discerning readings of her canonical poems, a welcome focus on more extensive literary analysis than normally found in biographies aimed at a general audience. For example, his treatment of the role that classical literature in translation plays in Wheatley Peters's oeuvre is the most balanced, sophisticated, and thorough I have seen.

Waldstreicher does not participate in the conversation about how we should refer to the subject of his biography. Both Honorée Fannone Jeffers and Zachary McLeod Hutchins (Early American Literature, vol. 56, no. 3, pp. 663–67) have recently made compelling arguments that we should call Phillis by her married name, as either Phillis Peters or Phillis Wheatley Peters. When Phillis Wheatley married John Peters in November 1778, she chose to replace her enslaved surname with the name he had created for himself once he had gained his own freedom. Her decision to reidentify herself by renaming herself through marriage is consistent with my overall [End Page 155] representation of the agency she demonstrated during her life before she met John. Rather than seeing Phillis's decision to marry him as the disastrous mistake her nineteenth-century biographer would have us believe it to...