Harriet Jacobs

HJ is famous for her single book, the fictionalised autobiography Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, published in 1861, a slave narrative which one editor sees as also a kind of captivity narrative with the racial implications reversed. Jacobs, who devoted herself for years to writing this book after her escape from the southern to the northern states of the USA, was for more than a century not recognised beyond a doubt as its author. She also wrote other works in the anti-slavery cause: letters both private and for newspapers, and essays.