Mary Adella Wolcott (November 13, 1879 – ?) was a Jamaican poet who wrote under the pen name Tropica.
Mary Adella Wolcott | |
|---|---|
| Born | November 13, 1879  Saint Mary Parish |
| Occupation | Poet |
Mary Adella Wolcott was born on November 13, 1879 in St. Mary's, Jamaica, the daughter of white American missionaries Henry Berdin Wolcott and Sarah Boardman Paddock.[1] Her grandfather, a white American Baptist missionary named Seth Taylor Wolcott, purchased an estate named Richmond in Saint Mary Parish and created a small manual labor school for blacks. Her father had been disinterested in Richmond and in 1941 she unsuccessfully attempted to engage the Jamaican government in creating "an industrial school, a baby Tuskegee".[2]
Wolcott attended Oberlin Academy in Oberlin, Ohio from 1896 to 1898[3] and graduated from the Drexel Institute Library School in 1908.[4]
Wolcott published a single volume of poetry, The Island of Sunshine. Her work romanticizes plantation-era Jamaica from an ethnographic and colonial perspective. Her "Nana" is an elegy for a black nanny and her disappearing cultural traditions, while "Busha's Song" frames an overseer as the pastor of the plantation.[5] Her work was later anthologized by J. E. Clare McFarlane.
In 1923, Wolcott was a founder of the Jamaica Poetry League, an offshoot of the Empire Poetry League.[6]
Bibliography
edit- The Island of Sunshine, New York, Knickerbocker Press, c. 1904 [7]
References
edit- ^ Wolcott, Chandler (1912). Wolcott genealogy : the family of Henry Wolcott, one of the first settlers of Windsor, Conn. Allen County Public Library Genealogy Center. Rochester, N.Y. : Genese Press.
- ^ Kenny, Gale L. (2010). Contentious liberties : American abolitionists in post-emancipation Jamaica, 1834-1866. University of Georgia Press. ISBN 978-0-8203-3399-1.
- ^ Ancestry.com, U.S., School Catalogs, 1765-1935, Oberlin College 1908, page 1078.
- ^ American Library Association; Library Association (1876). Library journal. Robarts - University of Toronto. New York, R.R. Bowker [etc.]
- ^ Donnell, Alison; Lawson Welsh, Sarah (1996). The Routledge reader in Caribbean literature. The Archive of Contemporary Music. London; New York : Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-12048-7.
- ^ Delia Jarrett-Macauley (1998). The life of Una Marson, 1905-65. Internet Archive. Manchester University Press. ISBN 978-0-7190-5284-2.
- ^ Herdick, Donald, ed. (1979). Caribbean writers (1st ed.). Three Continents Press. ISBN 978-0-914478-74-4 – via Internet Archive.