Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

Why it matters

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself came out in January 1861 from Thayer & Eldridge, with no author’s name on the title page and a preface signed “Linda Brent.” Harriet Jacobs wrote it as a woman who had been enslaved in North Carolina and had escaped to the North. It is read today because it tells, in the first person, what slavery meant for an enslaved woman: the sexual pursuit by a master, the fear for her children, and the choices that no one in a free household would have had to make.

The book works inside the conventions of sentimental fiction, including the seduction plot, and turns them against the expectations of its Northern women readers: Wikipedia notes that Jacobs frames domestic virtues as something enslaved women were denied the chance to practise. Lydia Maria Child edited the text and wrote the preface. For much of the twentieth century it was forgotten, and scholars such as John Blassingame took it for a novel Child had written. In the 1980s Jean Fagan Yellin used letters and local records to show that Jacobs was its author; her edition appeared in 1987.

Notice how the narrator addresses her readers directly, sometimes with shame and sometimes with accusation, and how her grandmother, Molly Horniblow, anchors the story. The seven years in the garret, about nine feet by seven and only three feet high at its tallest, make hiding itself an act of resistance. Content note: the narrative describes sexual coercion and harassment of an enslaved girl, whippings and the separation of families, and it contains racial slurs in slaveholders’ speech. The Vietnamese text on this site is the site’s own translation of the English original.

Introduction written for LitMundi with AI assistance and checked against the sources listed below.