In Search of Mary Seacole: The Making of a Cultural Icon (Simon and Schuster UK) by Helen Rappaport is a full-length biography of a Jamaican icon who recent scholarship has revealed as a major figure in Victorian British history, though she was nearly forgotten for decades after her death. Born in Jamaica, Seacole migrated to Panama before moving to Britain in the 1850s. On the outbreak of the Crimean War, she travelled to the battlefield, earning fame as a nurse and comforter of wounded soldiers — “the most famous Black celebrity of her generation.”