Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

The most famous autobiography written by a nineteenth-century African American woman, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is a triumph of American literature and the unflinching narrative that broke the silence on the psychosexual exploitation of African-American women '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.