SOURCE: Doherty, Thomas. “Harriet Jacob's Narrative Strategies: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.” The Southern Literary Journal 19, no. 1 (fall 1986): 79-91.

In the following essay, Doherty comments on Harriet Jacobs's skilled application of the narrative conventions of the popular sentimental novel to her Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.

In 1853, the fugitive slave Harriet Jacobs confided her literary ambitions to the poet and abolitionist Amy Post. “Don't expect too much of me, dear Amy,” she cautioned, “You shall have truth but not talent” (Sterling 79). Jacobs' modest opinion of the work that became Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, published in 1861 under the pseudonym Linda Brent, has generally accorded with critical opinion. When noted at all, it has been valued primarily as a historical document, one of the precious few antebellum slave narratives written by a woman—and even then, until quite recently, a...