Published in 1861 under the pseudonym Linda Brent, Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself is a powerful and complex autobiography in which she recorded and reflected on her life as a slave. Now considered a major...

Harriet A. Jacobs (1823-1897) was a slave who decided she must run away in order to protect her children from harsh treatment by their owners. Delilah Horniblow was a slave to Margaret Horniblow in the town of Edenton, North Carolina, just as Delilah's...

Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written By Herself (1861), stands out from the male-dominated slave narrative genre in its unique point of view and especially in its focus on the sexual exploitation of the female slave. Soon...

Harriet Ann Jacobs (1813 - March 7, 1897) was an American abolitionist and writer. She is best-known as the writer of the 1861 book Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, published under the pseudonym Linda Brent. She was born in Edenton, North Carolina...

In the following essay, Sorisio discusses the influence of Romanticism and Transcendentalism on the nineteenth-century's—and on Jacobs's—perception of "self," arguing that Linda Brent's sense of self encompasses both an individual and a collective identity. Additionally, Sorisio examines Jacobs's exploitation of sentimental conventions.

In the essay that follows, Mills studies the influence of Lydia Maria Child (abolitionist and editor of Incidents) on Jacobs's writing and on the book's structure and content.

In the following essay, Gwin examines the way in which the stereotypes and relationships of white and black women within the "slavocracy" of the South inform Jacobs's work. Gwin also demonstrates how Jacobs's narrative was influenced both by the conventions of the sentimental genre and by her white female audience, pointing out that the ideals of virtue and sensibility advanced by sentimental literature were incompatible with the experience of slave women.

Essay shows how Harriet Jacobs and Elizabeth Barrett Browning use sympathy in their work to get the readers to side with them.