Anna Maria Falconbridge was the first Englishwoman to publish an eye-witness narrative of her experiences in West Africa. She went out to Sierra Leone in 1791, went home briefly later in the year, then returned in February 1792, and stayed there until June 1793, recording her experiences in a series of letters.

She was born, Anna Maria Horwood, in Bristol, in 1769, the youngest of the five children of Charles and Grace Horwood (née Roberts). Her father was a watchmaker and goldsmith in All Saints Lane. When she was four years old her mother died. Her father eventually remarried, and had another family, most of whom died in childhood. He died of apoplexy in 1787. She then left home, and in the following year, at the age of nineteen, she married Alexander Falconbridge. Her fluent, lucid style of writing, and her felicitous choice of words, show that she had been given a remarkably good education.

Falconbridge had played a crucial role in the campaign to abolish the Atlantic slave trade. Thomas Clarkson, the initiator of the campaign, having founded in London in June 1787 a Committee for the Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade, at once began collecting evidence of its horrors. He started in Bristol, one of the main slave-trading ports. There he found people ready to give evidence privately, but no one who dared give it publicly. Then he met Falconbridge, a ship's surgeon, who, after a year's medical training at the Bristol Infirmary, had been employed between the years 1780 and 1787 on four successive voyages to West Africa on board slave ships. He had now left the slave trade for ever, disgusted by his experiences, and was only too glad to supply evidence of its cruelties.

When Clarkson moved on from Bristol to Liverpool, the heart of the slave trade, Falconbridge went with him to back up his moral arguments with fearlessly outspoken eye-witness accounts. When Clarkson was threatened with violence, he acted as his armed bodyguard. Clarkson then introduced him to his committee in London, and he agreed to substantiate what he had said in print. A Quaker lawyer, Richard Phillips, helped him to reduce it to publishable form, and in 1788 his An Account of the Slave Trade on the Coast of Africa (added on pp. 191–230) appeared.