Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (Modern Library Torchbearers). This item is unavailable.Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (Modern Library Torchbearers)

" I was born a slave; but I never knew it till six years of happy childhood had passed away. In clear and unshrinking prose, Harriet Jacobs writing under the pseudonym of Linda Brent relates the story of her girlhood and adolescence as a slave in North Carolina and her eventual escape: a bildungsroman set in the complex terrain of a chauvinist, white-supremacist society. Resolutely addressing women readers, rather than men, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl sought to make white women understand the ways that the threat of sexual violence shaped the lives of enslaved black women and children."

Harriet Jacobs was born into slavery in North Carolina in 1813, became a mother at sixteen, a fugitive slave at twenty-two, and, in January 1861 at age forty-eight, author of the most comprehensive antebellum slave narrative Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. During the Civil War, Jacobs and her daughter Louisa returned to the South to aid African-American refugees behind Union lines. From 1863-1865, Jacobs and Louisa worked to establish a school for African-Americans the Jacobs Free School in occupied Alexandria, Virginia and following the Civil War, from 1866-1868, they built an orphanage and home for African-American children and elders in Savannah, Georgia. Jacobs died in 1897.