Her name is a ship and a buyer. She arrived in Boston on 11 July 1761, about seven or eight years old, sold in West Africa and carried across in a vessel called the Phillis, and that is what they called her; the surname came from the family who purchased her. Eleven years later she had written a book of poems, and no printer in Boston would touch it. Before it could go anywhere at all she was examined, in 1772, by a panel of prominent Bostonians assembled to determine whether she had really written the work — and having satisfied themselves, they signed a statement saying so. John Hancock signed it. So did Thomas Hutchinson, the governor of Massachusetts, and Andrew Oliver, the lieutenant governor, and John Erving, and the Reverend Charles Chauncey, among others. Their attestation was printed at the front of the book, so that Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral opens not with her voice but with eighteenth-century Boston's certification that a young enslaved woman was capable of what follows. It was published in London in September 1773, subsidised by Selina Hastings, Countess of Huntingdon, because the city she lived in would not print it. The document was meant to authenticate the poems. What it actually preserves is the assumption she had to defeat before a single line of hers could be read.

The figure has her seated with the chair supplied, book open across her lap, in a plain gown with a white cap — a working writer's afternoon rather than a portrait pose. Within weeks of publication the Wheatleys freed her. Two years after that she sent a poem to the commander of the Continental Army, "To His Excellency, George Washington," and he wrote back praising it and asked her to call on him at his Cambridge headquarters; that meeting is one of the odder and better footnotes of 1776, and General George Washington stands in this collection a few shelves away. What freedom did not bring her was a living. She died on 5 December 1784, aged thirty-one, of pneumonia, working as a scullery maid and caring for a sick infant. The argument she had opened was carried on by Frederick Douglass, who made the written testimony of the enslaved impossible to dismiss, and by Harriet Tubman, who answered it a different way.

Model: 10177 / W. Britain / 1/30 scale / matte finish / 1 figure with chair