Harriet A. (Harriet Ann) Jacobs
1 book in the library
Harriet Jacobs (c. 1813–1897) was an American writer and reformer, born into slavery in Edenton, North Carolina. Subjected as a teenager to the sexual harassment of the man who held her in bondage, she escaped him in 1835 by hiding in a tiny attic space in her grandmother’s house, where she remained for nearly seven years before fleeing north by boat in 1842. In New York she worked as a nursemaid in the household of the writer Nathaniel Parker Willis, whose wife bought her freedom in 1852. Encouraged by the Quaker abolitionist Amy Post, she wrote Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, published in 1861 under the pseudonym Linda Brent with the help of the editor Lydia Maria Child. During and after the Civil War she worked to aid refugees from slavery in Virginia and Georgia, and helped found a school for freed children. She died in Washington in 1897.
