Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl » (Reprint)

Jean Fagan Yellin is Distinguished Professor Emerita, Department of English, Pace University.

Jean Fagan Yellin is Distinguished Professor Emerita, Department of English, Pace University, the author of Harriet Jacobs: A Life, and the editor of The Harriet Jacobs Family Papers.

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is the first full-length narrative written by a former woman slave in America.

KLIATT

This is a new and enlarged edition of one of the classic female slave narratives. It includes not only the account, as first written by Harriet A. Jacobs in 1861, but a newly discovered autobiographical sketch, entitled "A True Tale of Slavery," by her brother, John S. Jacobs. He, like his sister Harriet, escaped from slavery; John was active as an abolitionist. Harriet A. Jacobs was born into slavery in North Carolina in 1813. She was a house servant, and constantly fearful of sexual predation from her master. She bore two children by another man whom her master despised. Her plight was made worse by her master's wife, whose jealousy seemed to know no bounds. Finally she ran off, and hid for seven years in a narrow part of an attic. When the opportunity arose, she was able to flee north on a steamboat, with the cooperation of its sympathetic captain. This narrative is considered one of the great works of African American women's literature. It is a book that one cannot put down, a book that is immensely informative and inspiring, a book, which, like other classic slave narratives (e.g., John Brown's Slave Life in Georgia), demonstrates the resistance of slaves to every aspect of their enslavement. White readers may cringe, for they will see the criminality behind what is called Southern "heritage," and will be stirred by a recognition of the dignity that slaves maintained by active resistance and by refusing to be brainwashed. KLIATT Codes: SA—Recommended for senior high school students, advanced students, and adults. 2000 (orig. 1987), Harvard Univ. Press, 336p, notes, index, 24cm, 99-088151, $16.95. Ages 16 to adult. Reviewer: John Rosser; Professor, Boston College,Chestnut Hill, MA, July 2000 (Vol. 34 No. 4)