Poems: 'I was made to have a place''

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper was born free on 24th September 1825 in Baltimore, Maryland which, at that time, was still a slave state.

By age 3 Frances had been orphaned and thereafter raised by her maternal aunt and uncle who also gave her her surname; Watkins.

At 13 she was working as a seamstress and then as a nursemaid for a white family that owned a bookshop. Here any spare time was used to read books in the shop and work on her own writing which from 1839 included pieces in anti-slavery...