Harriet Jacobs Incidents In The Life Of A Slave Girl

Harriet Jacobs was born into slavery in 1813 near Edenton, North Carolina. She enjoyed a relatively happy family life until she was six years old, when her mother died. Jacobs’s mistress, Margaret Horniblow, took her in and cared for her, teaching her to read, write, and sew. When Horniblow died, she willed the twelve-year-old Jacobs to her niece, and Jacobs’s life soon took a dramatic turn for the worse. Her new mistress’s father, Dr. James Norcom (“Dr. Flint” in Incidents), subjected Jacobs to aggressive and unrelenting sexual harassment. At age sixteen, afraid that Norcom would eventually rape her, Jacobs began a relationship with a white neighbour, Samuel Tredwell Sawyer (“Mr. Sands” in Incidents), and with him she had two children while still in her teens. Instead of discouraging Norcom, Jacobs’s affair only enraged him. In 1835, he sent her away to a life of hard labor on a plantation he owned, also threatening to break in her young children as field hands.
Jacobs soon ran away from the plantation and spent almost seven years hiding in a tiny attic crawl space in her grandmother’s house. She was unable to sit or stand, and she eventually became permanently physically disabled. In 1842, Jacobs escaped to New
For most of the twentieth century, however, scholars believed the book to be a fictional tale written to further the abolitionist cause, and that “Linda Brent,” its protagonist, had never really existed. They speculated that Lydia Maria Child, who was a successful novelist as well as an activist, must have been the memoir’s real author. Not until the 1980s, when the critic Jean Fagan Yellin discovered a cache of letters from Harriet Jacobs to Lydia Maria Child, did Jacobs again receive credit for her work. Yellin went on to research Jacobs’s life and verify that the events of Incidents are true and