Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom fits this template closely, with the interesting modification that its protagonist is actually a married couple whose escape depends on a woman’s performance. The narrative navigates this by positioning Ellen primarily as the vehicle of the escape — the person whose appearance and performance made it possible — while placing William in the traditional narrator’s position. Ellen speaks in the narrative, is present in it, and her specific contributions are acknowledged. But the voice that organizes and presents the account is William’s.
What this means for how we read the narrative is that Ellen’s interiority is mediated in a specific way. We know what William observed and remembered of her behavior on the journey; we have the exchanges he recorded; we have her later letters and her public actions. But the experience of being inside the disguise, of making the decisions she made in real time under pressure, of whatever she felt during the four days and in the days after — this comes to us through William’s retrospective account, shaped by the narrative conventions of the genre, aimed at an audience with specific expectations.
Scholars who have written about this have been careful not to conclude too much from the gap. Barbara McCaskill has argued for taking Ellen seriously as a contributor to the narrative’s construction even when the title page doesn’t credit her; she has also argued for reading the silences in the record — the places where Ellen’s voice is absent or filtered — as historically significant rather than simply as absences. What we can’t hear from Ellen directly tells us something about the conditions under which women’s voices were recorded and preserved in this period.