Slavery in the US has inspired several writers in this series (Du Bois, Wright, Baldwin, Obama), and there will be more. Here in Britain, however, mainly for historical reasons, there is distressingly little black prose of consequence to be found in the English canon before the 20th century. Mary Seacole stands out as a gloriously entertaining exception, a Caribbean witness to the black experience in the Victorian age who deserves to be much better known. Hers, indeed, is the first autobiography by a black woman in Britain, and it describes a remarkable life story.

She was born Mary Jane Grant in Jamaica in 1805 during slavery, but teasingly declares at the outset that “as a female and a widow”, she may be excused from “giving the precise date of this important event”. What’s not in doubt is that she died in England in fairly comfortable circumstances on 14 May 1881 and was buried in St Mary’s Roman Catholic cemetery in Kensal Green, London. In her lifetime, she was a much-loved and widely revered black woman who was especially renowned throughout the empire for her work with the sick and wounded of the Crimean war. In fact, although she is sometimes described as “the black Florence Nightingale”, Seacole always called herself “a Creole”, and had mixed-race ancestry.

Seacole was the daughter of James Grant, a Scots lieutenant with the British army, and a free Jamaican woman. “I have good Scotch blood coursing in my veins,” she writes. Her mother was a “doctress”, a healer who used Caribbean and African herbal remedies, from whom young Mary acquired her nursing skills.

The structure of Seacole’s Wonderful Adventures was probably shaped by commercial considerations: she had to captalise on her fame as a veteran nurse from the Crimean war, a conflict that captured the mid-century British imagination to a remarkable degree. Accordingly, she cuts to the chase, disposing of her first 40 years, during which she visited relatives in England (“I am not going to bore the reader with my first impressions of London”), in a single chapter. Then, once she has moved to Cruces, in Panama, she uses several chapters to get into her stride as a mature woman, before focusing on her career in the Crimea, drawn to the experience, she writes, by the heady “pomp, pride and circumstance of glorious war”.

But first she had to overcome many obstacles to fulfil her ambition “to join my old friends of the 97th, 48th, and other regiments [encountered in the Caribbean], battling with worse foes than yellow fever or cholera... ” On the face of it, her ambitions were too “visionary”.

“To persuade the British public that an unknown Creole woman would be useful to their army before the walls of Sebastopol was too improbable an achievement to be thought of for an instant.”

In the end, however, the terrible conditions in the Crimea came to her assistance. After the battles of Balaclava and Inkerman, public opinion swung decisively behind missions of mercy to the hospitals in Scutari. Seacole was on her way. Denied official support, she went out to the Crimea using her own resources, to open an establishment, the “British hotel”, near Balaclava, which would offer “a mess-table and comfortable quarters for sick and convalescent officers”. Ever resourceful, she arrived in Scutari with a letter of introduction to Florence Nightingale, whom she describes as “a slight figure with a pale, gentle and firm face”.

Seacole seems to have had the kind of indomitable energy (and extravagant costume) we now associate with Camila Batmanghelidjh. Arriving in the Crimea, she talks her way into meeting Nightingale at the Barrack hospital in Scutari. She reports that the “lady with the lamp” was friendly: “What do you want, Mrs Seacole? Anything we can do for you? If it lies in my power, I shall be very happy.”

Seacole’s “hotel” was a great success, supplying British military personnel with food, drink and domestic comforts. “Mother Seacole”, as she was known, was never afraid to roll up her sleeves and get involved, even serving as a chef: “Whenever I had a few leisure moments, I used to wash my hands, and roll out pastry.” When called to “dispense medications,” she did so with aplomb, as well as dispensing frequent glasses of champagne. On his first visit, William Russell, the special correspondent of the Times, wrote that: “... Mrs Seacole cures all manner of men with extraordinary success. She is always in attendance near the battlefield to aid the wounded, and has earned many a poor fellow’s blessings.”

In addition to her mission to the forces, Seacole also catered for spectators at the battles, in which she inevitably got mixed up. She was, wrote Russell, “both a Miss Nightingale and a chef”, who was always visible in her brightly coloured and conspicuous outfits – bright blue, or yellow, with ribbons in contrasting colours. Seacole’s mission was idiosyncratic: “If I had nothing else to be proud of, I think my rice puddings, made without milk, upon the high road to Sebastopol, would have gained me a reputation. What a shout there used to be when I came out of my little caboose, hot and curried, and called out, ‘Rice pudding day, my sons.”

And then there was also the influence of Mother Seacole’s renowned baking, especially her cakes:

“I declare I never heard or read of an army so partial to pastry as that British army before Sebastopol. I had a reputation for my sponge cakes that any pastry cook in London might have been proud of.”

When the war ended, Seacole returned to Britain, but the strain of war had taken its toll. She was broke and unwell. However, she was greeted as a celebrity from the conflict, attending a celebratory dinner in August 1856, at which Florence Nightingale was the guest of honour. The Times described huge enthusiasm, with “burly” sergeants protecting her from the pressure of the crowd. Her financial difficulties did not go away, with the creditors who had supplied the “British hotel” in hot pursuit. Eventually, in circumstances not described in Wonderful Adventures, she landed up in the bankruptcy court in November 1856.

The closing pages of her short conclusion deal with her return to England. She was perhaps too modest to describe how she became the toast of London society, friends with the Princess of Wales, for whom she worked as a masseuse, and an exotic late-Victorian celebrity, loved for quirky humour and robust, slightly raffish, joie de vivre.

Seacole’s Wonderful Adventures, a bestseller in its day, was dedicated to a veteran of the Crimea, Major General Lord Rokeby, commander of the 1st Division, which indicates Seacole’s debt to the conflict. Russell contributed a preface in which he described Seacole’s memoir as “unique in literature”. He characterised Seacole as “a plain truth-speaking woman who has lived an adventurous life amid scenes which have never yet found a historian”.

Russell certainly bears some responsibility for creating the “myth” of Mary Seacole. In 1855, one of his reports in the Times probably strayed rather too close to rhapsodic hyperbole: “I have seen her nurse, under fire, our wounded men. A more tender or skilful hand about a wound or a broken limb could not be found among our best surgeons. I saw her at the fall of Sebastopol, laden not with plunder (good old soul), but with wine, bandages, and food for the wounded and the prisoners.”

There’s no doubt that this “good old soul” plainly captivated those around her, and her autobiography (which was possibly dictated to a publisher’s “ghost”) perfectly captures her personal magnetism.

Whatever the full story of her long and unusual life, Mary Seacole is a strangely modern figure. She risked her life to care for the military casualties of a catastrophic war, and shared with the troops the horrors of a brutal, Victorian conflict the details of whose engagements are never less than harrowing.

As Russell wrote: “I have witnessed her devotion and her courage”, and he celebrated her “errand of mercy”. The Times man concluded: “I trust that England will never forget one who has nursed her sick, who sought out her wounded to aid and succour them and who performed the last offices for some of her illustrious dead.”

A signature sentence

“How often have I felt sad at the sight of poor lads who in England thought attending early parade a hardship and felt harassed if their neckcloths sat awry, or their natty little boots would not retain their polish, bearing so nobly and bravely, trials and hardships to which the veteran campaigner frequently succumbed.”

Three to compare

WEB Du Bois: The Souls of Black Folk (1903)
Richard Wright: Black Boy (1945)
Malcolm X (with Alex Haley): The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965)

• The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands is available in Penguin Classics (£9.99). To order a copy for £8.49, go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min. p&p of £1.99.