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The complete online text of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Ann Jacobs.

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 work...

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 m...

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written By Herself. By Harriet A. Jacobs. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000. xli + 228 p. $39.95 (cloth); $17.95 (paper). Edited and introduced by Jean Fagan Yellin, this enlarged edition of Incidents in the Life...

INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE OF A SLAVE GIRL: Written by Herself. By Harriet A. Jacobs. Edited by Jean Yellin Fagan. Harvard University Press. 252 pp. $37.50. Paper $9.95. "Slavery is terrible for men; but it is far more terrible for...

In the following essay, Dalton examines the "tensions between what [Jacobs literally states and metaphorically suggests about sexual exploitation," pointing to the parallels between the way in which Jacobs, through Linda Brent, describes her sexual exploitation and twentieth-century studies on the effects of molestation on girls and women. Dalton suggests that through her language and imagery, Jacobs implies that greater sexual abuses occurred in her life than what Brent reports.]

In the following essay, Carby explores the influence of the nineteenth-century conception of "true womanhood" on Incidents and contends that Jacobs used the events of her life to "critique conventional standards of female behavior and to question their relevance and applicability to the experience of black women."

In the following essay, Sherman pinpoints the source of the moral conflict and ambiguity in Incidents as the narrator's struggle with the exploitation and brutality of slavery and the idealized conception of "true womanhood." Furthermore, Sherman argues that the depiction of this conflict is the source of the work's strength.

Analyzes the novel, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, by Harriet Jacobs. Compares the expectations of a woman in the woman of the 19th century to a slave woman's position. Explores how gender identity affected slavery.

In Harriet Jacob's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, the traditional role of motherhood is destroyed by the institution of slavery. Mothers in slave families are powerless to protect their children from harm, yet the maternal instinct prevails. Linda goes to great lengths to protect her children from a devastating future.

This essay explains how Harriet Jacob's uses feminism both in authorship and audience analysis as a means to force her voice to be heard. It discusses the different ways she reaches her specific audience, which is made up of the free white women of the north.