Harriet Jacobs

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Standard Name: Jacobs, Harriet
Birth Name: Harriet Ann Jacobs
Pseudonym: Linda Brent
Indexed Name: Mrs 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.
Black and white photograph of Harriet Jacobs, seated in an ornately carved, high-backed chair, wearing a long dark dress with long sleeves and a multi-layered dark bodice. Her white hair is frizzy and pulled back.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Intertextuality and Influence Toni Morrison
TM discusses the political and social uses of drawing lines of categorization within and across the single human race. She uses a story by Flannery O'Connor to jolt her readers with a taste of the...
Author summary Lydia Maria Child
LMC , nineteenth-century American woman of letters, published novels, children's books, domestic-advice books, newspaper articles and columns in the form of letters, as well as biography, controversial works against slavery, a remarkable history of world...
Textual Features Malorie Blackman
Here stories and poems by present-day writers (like Grace Nichols , John Agard , Alex Haley , Blackman herself, and Benjamin Zephaniah ) appear along with testimony from some of those who were actually enslaved...
Textual Production Lydia Maria Child
LMC 's most important literary work for the benefit of enslaved Americans was her editorship of the National Anti-Slavery Standard, mentioned above. She also edited for publication Harriet Jacobs 's autobiographical Incidents in the...
Textual Production Harriet Beecher Stowe
One of the stories she wished to include in this text was the one related to her by Harriet Jacobs , who had written to Stowe for advice on how to tell her own story...

Timeline

No timeline events available.

Texts

Jacobs, Harriet. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Editor Child, Lydia Maria, Printed for the author, 1861.
Jacobs, Harriet. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Editor Yellin, Jean Fagan, Harvard University Press, 1987.
Jacobs, Harriet. “Introduction”. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, edited by Jean Fagan Yellin, Harvard University Press, 1987, p. vii - xxxv.