Nonfiction · 1861
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
Written by Herself
Harriet Jacobs, writing as “Linda Brent”, tells of her childhood in North Carolina, the sexual persecution she endured from her owner, the seven years she spent hidden in a crawl space in her grandmother’s house within sight of her children, and her escape north. Published in Boston in 1861, edited by Lydia Maria Child, it is the most important slave narrative written by a woman.
Jacobs wrote it herself, at night, after service, and the book carries the pressure of that. It is addressed directly to the free women of the North, and its subject is the one the male narratives could not carry: what slavery did to women, to marriage and to mothers, and the impossible arithmetic by which a woman calculated what she could trade to keep her children.
The volume prints Jacobs’s own preface, the forty-one chapters and the appendix. Lydia Maria Child’s introduction as editor is not included.
Contents
- Epigraph
- Preface by the Author
- I — Childhood
- II — The New Master and Mistress
- III — The Slaves’ New Year’s Day
- IV — The Slave Who Dared to Feel Like a Man
- V — The Trials of Girlhood
- VI — The Jealous Mistress
- VII — The Lover
- VIII — What Slaves Are Taught to Think of the North
- IX — Sketches of Neighboring Slaveholders
- X — A Perilous Passage in the Slave Girl’s Life
- XI — The New Tie to Life
- XII — Fear of Insurrection
- XIII — The Church and Slavery
- XIV — Another Link to Life
- XV — Continued Persecutions
- XVI — Scenes at the Plantation
- XVII — The Flight
- XVIII — Months of Peril
- XIX — The Children Sold
- XX — New Perils
- XXI — The Loophole of Retreat
- XXII — Christmas Festivities
- XXIII — Still in Prison
- XXIV — The Candidate for Congress
- XXV — Competition in Cunning
- XXVI — Important Era in My Brother’s Life
- XXVII — New Destination for the Children
- XXVIII — Aunt Nancy
- XXIX — Preparations for Escape
- XXX — Northward Bound
- XXXI — Incidents in Philadelphia
- XXXII — The Meeting of Mother and Daughter
- XXXIII — A Home Found
- XXXIV — The Old Enemy Again
- XXXV — Prejudice Against Color
- XXXVI — The Hairbreadth Escape
- XXXVII — A Visit to England
- XXXVIII — Renewed Invitations to Go South
- XXXIX — The Confession
- XL — The Fugitive Slave Law
- XLI — Free at Last
- Appendix
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Subjects
About this edition
The text is free of copyright. This edition was prepared from an authoritative digitisation, processed by Bibliomancer under its own review protocol; every automated correction is recorded in its transformation log. Rights assessed for CA, EU, GB, US.
Part of American Literature.
Source mind
About the author
1813–1897 · Victorian
Harriet Jacobs (1813–1897) was born into slavery in Edenton, North Carolina, hid for nearly seven years in a garret in her grandmother’s house to escape her owner, and reached the North in 1842. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), published under the name Linda Brent, is her account. During and after the Civil War she did relief work among freed people in Virginia and Georgia.
Adjacent records
