Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself

About the book

Published in 1861 under the pseudonym Linda Brent, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is Harriet Jacobs’s account of her life in slavery in Edenton, North Carolina, and of her escape. Pursued by the man who held her in bondage, she hid for nearly seven years in a cramped crawlspace above a storeroom in her grandmother’s house before reaching the North. Jacobs wrote directly to Northern women, describing the sexual exploitation enslaved women faced and the impossible choices it forced on them, subjects few narratives of the time addressed so openly. Edited by the abolitionist Lydia Maria Child, the book was long dismissed as fiction, until twentieth-century research confirmed Jacobs’s authorship and the truth of her story.

Characters

• Linda Brent (Harriet Jacobs) — Narrator

  The name Jacobs uses for herself in recounting her struggle against enslavement and sexual coercion.

• Dr. Flint — Enslaver

  The pseudonym for the man who persecutes Linda and attempts to control her life.

• Aunt Martha — Linda's grandmother

  A formerly enslaved woman whose home and resourcefulness sustain Linda's family.

• William — Linda's brother

  A brother whose experiences and pursuit of freedom run alongside Linda's own.

• Mr. Sands — Father of Linda's children

  A white man whose relationship with Linda becomes entangled with her efforts to protect her children.

• Benny — Linda's son

  Linda's elder child, whose safety is central to her decisions.

• Ellen — Linda's daughter

  Linda's younger child, for whom she hopes to secure a life beyond slavery.

About the author

HJ

Harriet A. (Harriet Ann) Jacobs

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.