We have needed a book like Vincent Carretta's Phillis Wheatley: Biography of a Genius in Bondage for a long time. The importance of this life in particular—one that we ask to represent both the ordinary and the exemplary case simultaneously—cannot be overstated. For all her local and international celebrity, however, as a formerly enslaved woman of African descent in eighteenth-century America, Wheatley left behind frustrating little evidence of her life and experiences. Carretta's investigative method in the first book-length biography of this important early poet is twofold—indefatigable archival sleuthing to uncover new knowledge about Wheatley herself and deep historical contextualization to fill in the gaps that yet remain. The result is this compelling and indispensible book.

Carretta's chapters move chronologically through Wheatley's life. The first chapter weaves together the broader contexts of the transatlantic slave trade with specific new details, such as instructions from the owner of the Phillis to its captain around the time of the voyage that first brought the kidnapped Wheatley to Boston. The second chapter begins with some basic religious contexts of the eighteenth-century transatlantic world before focusing on some wonderfully fresh insights regarding Wheatley's early education. By contextualizing the better-documented examples of two of Wheatley's contemporaries—Chloe Spear, an enslaved woman also kidnapped from Africa before the age of ten, and Anna Green Winslow, a young white neighbor of similar social status to the Wheatley family—Carretta demonstrates exactly how remarkable Wheatley's educational achievement was. Here is an example of Carretta's skeptical perspicacity at its best as he draws from extensive knowledge in the field and extraordinary original archival research to form a persuasive account of what would otherwise be simply conjectural. In chapter 3 Carretta brings together more deep historical contextualization with close textual analysis of poems in order to chart Wheatley's continued intellectual maturation and early career, while chapter 4 fills out our picture of Wheatley as an agent of her own budding career and growing celebrity. Particularly illuminating in this section is Carretta's consideration of the unusual inclusion of a frontispiece of the author for a first book of poetry (an image of Wheatley now so ubiquitous as to seem to us familiar and natural). Chapter 5 is in some ways the most speculative in the book, delving into the psychology of Wheatley's 1773 trip to England (where the recent Mansfield decision meant that she could not be compelled to return to enslavement in the colonies) and subsequent return to Boston. Carretta culls much from circumstantial evidence of the visit, creating a compelling sense of the ambivalence Wheatley must have felt poised between two worlds.

Wheatley did return to Boston and there gained her freedom, and her life as a single, and then later married, free woman of African descent is treated in chapters 6 and 7 respectively. These last chapters contain perhaps the most remarkable revelations about Wheatley and her life. Our impression of her years after enslavement has always been particularly murky, based largely Margaretta Matilda Odell's highly problematic nineteenth-century memoir of the poet. But the biographical problem is far larger than Odell. On the most basic level, as Carretta illustrates, free people of African descent left far less of a paper trail than the enslaved—a perverse elision that highlights the experience of slavery over that of freedom. With its many startling archival discoveries, the final chapters of Genius in Bondage offer some of the most useful interventions into Wheatley biography, revealing the twined effects of post-enslavement, post-Revolutionary experience upon Wheatley's promising poetic career. Her much-maligned husband, John Peters, becomes a thoroughly dimensional presence through Carretta's remarkable work with tax and court records. And if this picture reaffirms our sense that the marital union ultimately compromised some of Wheatley's professional prospects—as she moves from femme sole to femme covert—so, too, do we see the risks and obstacles faced by Peters himself, a sometimes-successful businessman buffeted by both entrenched racism and the economic climate of post-Revolutionary America. Who knew, for example, how much the scarcity of specie currency would affect the fortunes of the newlywed couple and thwart Wheatley's ability to bring forth her second book?

At the end of the book, Carretta engages some counterfactual musings about what might have happened had Wheatley remained in England in 1773 rather than return to the possibility of continued enslavement in America. This brief detour usefully highlights the incredible complexity of Wheatley's situation and the full nature of the risks she faced in seeking a poetic career, her freedom, and financial independence simultaneously. In only a few places does Carretta indulge in pure speculation, usually when trying to imagine the specific emotions of Wheatley at a particular moment. Throughout he takes scrupulous care to explain historical context at every turn, which has the effect in places of making some of the prose a bit staccato and declarative. Ultimately, however, these stylistic choices make the book all the more useful to a wide variety of readers across disciplinary and professional levels. Carretta's work, that is to say, will be as useful to the specialized scholar as it will be to the undergraduate encountering Wheatley for the first time. We can only hope that the University of Georgia Press is planning a paperback edition of this book for course adoption in history, literature, and African American studies. Marshaling disparate avenues of historical, literary critical, and cultural studies, Carretta creates a study that is truly and efficaciously interdisciplinary. Those readers already familiar with the history of the Atlantic slave trade and the early anti-slavery movement will learn from the readings of individual poems. Literary scholars will be able to read the poems of Wheatley and her contemporaries with a fuller sense of that eighteenth-century transatlantic world. A landmark contribution to the field of Wheatley scholarship, this biography will not be the last word but rather a bedrock for many new, important conversations about Wheatley's life, career, and legacy.