Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is an autobiographical slave narrative by Harriet Jacobs, the formerly enslaved American who lived from 1813 to 1897. The book was first published in 1861 under the pseudonym Linda Brent and is now recognised as one of the most important American slave narratives ever written and one of the central documents of nineteenth century American literature.

Jacobs was born into slavery in Edenton, North Carolina, and spent her childhood and young adulthood under the legal ownership of various members of the Norcom family. The narrative describes in substantial detail the conditions of her enslaved life, with particular attention to the sexual harassment and threats that she experienced from her owner Doctor Norcom, who appears in the narrative as Doctor Flint. The book is the most substantial nineteenth century account of the specific sexual dimensions of slavery from the perspective of an enslaved woman, and Jacobs’s willingness to write about subjects that the conventional propriety of her period made extremely difficult was part of what gave the book its substantial moral and political force.

The central narrative of the book follows Jacobs’s eventual decision to escape from Doctor Norcom and her substantial seven year period of hiding in a small attic crawl space in her grandmother’s house in Edenton before she was finally able to escape to the North. The hiding period and the eventual escape are among the most remarkable episodes in the substantial body of American slave narratives, and the cumulative picture of the daily endurance required to survive the years in hiding is one of the most powerful aspects of the book.

Jacobs was assisted in the eventual production of the book by the abolitionist writer Lydia Maria Child, who edited the manuscript and wrote an introduction attesting to the authenticity of the narrative. For substantial parts of the twentieth century the book was treated with scepticism by various academic historians who questioned whether it was genuinely the work of a formerly enslaved person, but the substantial scholarship by Jean Fagan Yellin from the 1980s onward definitively established Jacobs’s authorship and reconstructed the substantial documentary record that supports the truth of the narrative.

The book is essential reading for anyone interested in American slavery, in nineteenth century American women’s writing, or in the broader American autobiographical and slave narrative tradition. It runs about three hundred pages and pairs naturally with Frederick Douglass’s narratives.