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Harriet Jacobs is best known as the author of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861),
a work of autobiographical fiction – or fictionalized autobiography – that details some of the horrors of enslavement specific to Black women and played a key role in abolitionist movements. Jacobs was born into enslavement in 1813 in Edenton, North Carolina, “twenty-four years after the adoption of the Constitution had firmly established slavery in the newly formed United States” (Yellin Harriet Jacobs 3). After years of enslavement that included sexual assault by her enslaver and nearly a decade of living in concealment, Jacobs escaped Edenton. She eventually arrived in Boston, where friends purchased her freedom, and managed to secure her children’s emancipation. Joining the abolitionist movement, she wrote Incidents to recruit white northerner women to the cause. During the war she lived in Alexandria, VA and helped organize support for fugitives and, eventually, freedpeople fleeing the South. Not only did she go to remarkable lengths to free herself and her family from enslavement, but she also tirelessly devoted her post-emancipation life to ending slavery and affirming the humanity of Black people. As her most significant biographer, Jean Fagan Yellin, puts it, “[c]ommitting herself to freedom, she made her life representative of the struggle for liberation” (Harriet Jacobs 3).

Jacobs’s semi-autobiographical narrator, Linda Brent, claims to have not known she was
enslaved until after the death of her mother when she was six years old, claiming, “I was so
fondly shielded that I never dreamed I was a piece of merchandise” (Jacobs 9). While Yellin
confirms that Jacobs’s early life was “shielded” from some of the most brutal aspects of slavery,
Brent’s claim that she “never knew” was probably somewhat exaggerated. In fact, until Yellin’s
“discovery of a cache of letters” enabled her to confirm many events, locations, and persons
depicted in Incidents, proving Jacobs’s authorship, many readers believed Incidents was a work
of pure fiction (Yellin, “Written” 479). Critic Joanne Braxton shows that many slave narratives
have been subject to “authenticity” challenges, especially Black women’s, and argues that male-
and white-centric criteria has long discouraged literary analysis of such texts. In the case of
Incidents, although Linda Brent’s story aligns with Harriet Jacobs’s own life, critics have shown
that Jacobs expertly frames her story in ways that play on fictional conventions. Her specific
purpose is to mobilize abolitionist sentiment and activism, “arous[ing] the women of the North to
a realizing sense of the condition of two millions of women at the South, still in bondage”
(Jacobs 5). Because Jacobs writes toward an abolitionist purpose, and because she writes semi-
autobiographically using pseudonyms and a fictionalized narrator, scholars have analyzed
Incidents in terms of its purpose, literary structures, and approach to concepts of motherhood and
womanhood. For example, Stephanie Li suggests that, “[r]ather than conflate Jacobs with the
text’s protagonist, as many previous critics have done,” readers should “analyze Linda as a
literary figure deliberately constructed to perform certain political aims” (15). Much scholarship
has been dedicated to analyzing the tensions in how Jacobs both appeals to white womanhood
and writes within its conventions in order to gain a readership and mobilize abolitionist work,
and how she writes a Black womanhood within enslavement that conveys agency and
resistances. Bearing in mind both Jacobs’s real experiences and Brent’s politically-directed
rhetoric, readers can understand Incidents as both a testament to Jacobs’s wisdom and bravery
and as a work in the Black feminist tradition of consciousness raising.

In Jacobs’s early adolescence, the man who claimed to own her, James Norcom,
“subjected her to unrelenting sexual harassment” (“Written” 480), which she reveals in Incidents,
even as she maintains a decorous and religious tone throughout. Her portrayal demonstrates a
masterful deployment of sentimentalism, a rhetorical technique for creating empathy among
readers that was particularly suited to Jacobs’s primary audience of white women. In “Harriet
Jacobs and the Sentimental Politics of Female Suffering,” Franny Nudelman analyzes Jacobs’s
use of sentimental writing and the literary conventions of the time. She writes, “The text’s
cultural significance lies neither in Jacobs’s acquiescence to the social and literary standards nor
in her defiant rejection of them but in her restless movement between styles of address” (942). In
moving between these different styles, Jacobs is “caught between a domestic ideology that relies
on female sexual purity and an abolitionist discourse that insistently publicizes the sexual
victimization of slave women” (942). While discussing Jacobs’s balanced deployment of
domestic ideology and an abolitionist discourse, Nudelman argues that “Jacobs is peculiarly able
to elaborate on their interrelatedness, the ways they concur and conflict, and their particular
limitations for the narration of black female experience” (942). Li similarly focuses on how
Jacobs uses depictions of motherhood as a sentimental literary strategy: “Using Linda’s
maternity as a crucial point of identification with her readers, Jacobs challenges her audience to
conceive of the duties […] associated with motherhood as a political position and as a movement
of social reform” (18). Jacobs’s primary goal of getting white northern women to empathize and
identify with her plight is thus directly related to her creation of a narrator whose actions are valorized by her devotedness to her children. As Nudelman valuably underscores, writing a
narrative about Black female enslavement within these differing discourses and perspectives
allows Jacobs to interrogate the category of (white) womanhood.

Jacobs was well aware that norms of sexual purity were at odds with her experience. She
describes the many ways she tried to keep herself safe as Norcom’s threats intensified, but the
choice that kept her safest was one she was reticent to reveal. Although she speaks very little
about the particulars of the relationship in Incidents, Jacobs began “a sexual liaison with a young
white neighbor,” Sam Sawyer, a local politician who was in a position to offer her some
protection (“Harriet” 56). As Yellin pointedly explains in her biography of Jacobs,

Her mind filled with schemes to escape Norcom and her flesh
crawling with his touch, at fifteen, Harriet Jacobs became Samuel Tredwell Sawyer’s mistress. Confessing this in her book years later, she revealed virtually nothing about their relationship, not even where and when they met. She only describes one scene when they were alone together and she risked capture to beg him to free their children. But clearly they met often, and clearly she became pregnant. (Harriet Jacobs 27)

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Throughout her time hiding in the small attic space, Harriet observed her family, friends,
and neighbors however she could. In Incidents, she reports that she received her meals through
the trap door, and that when it became dark, those few who knew her hiding place could give her
news from the day. She recalls finding a tool with which to bore a small hole in the street side of
the house and sitting “till late into the night, to enjoy the little whiff of air that floated in” and,
most important, the sights and sounds of her growing children (Jacobs 98, 99).

“At last I heard the merry laugh of children, and presently two sweet
little faces were looking up at me, as though they knew I was there, and were conscious of the
joy they imparted. How I longed to tell them I was there!”

Jacobs 99

As motherhood is a central theme throughout Jacobs’s narrative, she often describes the
difficulty of not being with her children as well as her deep desire to reunite with them.
Simultaneously, Jacobs was aware that Norcom’s obsession with her posed an ongoing threat
that prevented mother and children from safely reuniting. About halfway through her seven years
in hiding, the children’s father, Sam Sawyer, granted Jacobs a degree of relief by using a third
party, concealing his attachment to Harriet, to finally convince Norcom to sell both of Harriet’s
children as well as her brother, John S. Jacobs (Yellin Harriet Jacobs 46). At first, Sawyer
“allowed them [Jacobs’s children] to live with her grandmother,” but he then relocated her
daughter to a northern state without granting either child their freedom (“Written” 480). In a
“memorable passage” that, “targeted her audience of free women schooled in nineteenth-century
sexual conformity and female domesticity,” Jacobs/Brent describes overhearing Sawyer outside
(Yellin Harriet Jacobs 56). She writes, “as he passed the window, I said, ‘Stop one moment, and
let me speak for my children’ . . . . I want nothing for myself; all I ask is, that you will free my
children,’” (Jacobs 106-07). Although Sawyer “promised he would do it” (107), it would still be
some time before he made good on his assurance, and four years before Jacobs made her next
move. According to Yellin, “Harriet Jacobs never divulged the details of her escape. She
revealed only that after almost seven years, an opportunity for freedom presented itself” (Harriet
Jacobs 63). Jacobs went north as a fugitive on June 10, 1842, and at last she was able to meet up
with her children (“Written” 480). Jacobs’s first years of freedom were repeatedly disrupted by
Norcom (or an informant of his) traveling north, attempting to find and recapture her (“Harriet”
56-7). Although she had escaped, Jacobs lived in constant fear of rediscovery by Norcom
himself, or from traveling southerners who might encounter her and report back to him. To avoid
recapture, she moved around often during the 1840s.

Jacobs spent several years employed by the Willis family looking after them and their
daughter, Imogen. Then, “Harriet Jacobs’s life changed again on March 25, 1845, the day Mary
Stace Willis died delivering a stillborn baby. Willis, bereft, wanted to take little Imogen to visit
her mother’s grieving family in England and went to Boston to ask Jacobs to accompany the
child” (Yellin Harriet Jacobs 83). Although she had only recently reunited with her own
daughter and son, Jacobs ultimately decided it would be her best option to go to England with
Willis and Imogen. She stayed with the two for ten months, during which time she “experienced
a sense of political and spiritual liberation in England,” for the first time not fearing the kind of
mistreatment she bore in America. Still, she longed to return to her children and so returned to
Boston, where she devoted her attention to supporting enslaved and formerly-enslaved people
through a number of charitable and abolitionist organizations.

Another significant stop was moving to Rochester in 1849, where “she ran an antislavery
reading room and met other reformers” (“Written” 481), including her life-long friend, Amy
Post, the white abolitionist who encouraged her to write down her story for political purposes
(“Written” 481). Incidents ends with the death of Jacobs’s influential grandmother, Molly
Horniblow, in 1853, which is also when Jacobs began to write the manuscript for Incidents.
Yellin explains that Jacobs’s October 1853 “letter to Amy Post signals a deep connection
between her decision [to write her life’s story] and Molly Horniblow’s death. On some level, the
death of the grandmother she had last seen eleven years earlier now freed Jacobs—a forty-year-
old former slave—to write her life” (Harriet Jacobs 125). In the letter Yellin cites, Jacobs begins
with the announcement of her grandmother’s death and then, “[o]pening a new paragraph, she …
finally nam[es] the project she has decided to undertake: ‘I must write just what I have lived and
witnessed myself dont expect much of me dear Amy you shall have truth but not talent God did
not give me that gift but he gave me a soul that burned for freedom and a heart nerved with
determination to suffer even unto death in pursuit of that liberty which without makes life an
intolerable burden’” (Harriet Jacobs 124).

As great as the challenge as writing the manuscript had been, getting it into print proved
difficult in other ways. One publisher agreed only if she could get Harriet Beecher Stowe or
Nathaniel Parker Willis to write a preface for the manuscript. Having already been rejected
(rather rudely) by Stowe, and knowing that Willis’s recent “Negro Happiness in Virginia”
aligned him with slavery apologists, Jacobs looked elsewhere. She eventually settled on Thayer
and Elridge, “publishers of James Redpath’s best-seller, The Public Life of Captain John Brown”
(Yellin 140), who agreed to print her work if she could get a preface from Lydia Marie Child.
Jacobs’s friend and prominent Black abolitionist, William C. Nell, who had provided support to
Jacobs on a few occasions since her arrival in the North, was able to set up a meeting with Child
for the women to discuss Jacobs’s proposal. “Much to her relief,” Yellin writes that Jacobs
“found Child ‘a whole souled Woman’ who not only agreed to supply a preface, but offered to
edit her manuscript” as well as working as Jacobs’s agent (Yellin 141). Child later reported that
she changed little of Jacobs’s language, claiming that she “abridged, and struck out superfluous
words sometimes, but I don’t think I altered fifty words in the whole volume.”

Even with Child’s help, publication was further delayed when Thayer and Elridge
collapsing into bankruptcy at the end of 1860. Fortunately, they had already created the plates,
which Jacobs bought and arranged for publication in her new home of Philadelphia in 1861.
Jacobs promoted her own book, and many like-minded abolitionists lauded it. Encouraged by its
initial successes, Jacobs arranged for it to be published in England as well, “[l]ess than a month”
after which, “the London publisher Hodson and Son produced a pirated edition” (Yellin Harriet
Jacobs 152), which, although it put money in the wrong pockets, nonetheless continued to spread
Jacobs’s story and message.

After the publication of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Jacobs continued to work
with various abolitionist causes, but also turned to aid-related work, helping fugitives at first, and
displaced formerly-enslaved people at the end of and after the Civil War. As early as the spring
of 1862, Jacobs was already on her way to Washington, DC, “taking with her bundles of
clothing, blankets, and shoes that she had been collecting from sympathetic supporters over the
winter” to provide to those who had run away with almost nothing. In her letter to William Lloyd
Garrison, “Life Among the Contrabands,” you can read about her experiences living
with what Congress was calling “‘contrabands of war’ … – those fugitives who had run from
disloyal [Confederate] owners” (Yellin Harriet Jacobs 158).

After Washington, DC, Jacobs felt called to Alexandria, VA, where formerly-enslaved
refugees lived in desperate conditions. Jacobs organized support, managed relief efforts, and
cared for refugees until things improved considerably. One major advancement that Jacobs
worked for was a school for Black students, run by Black leadership. In Alexandria, there was a
history of Black-led schools, but those that remained in the early 1860s all required tuition that
refugees did not have the resources to pay (Yellin Harriet Jacobs 176). Jacobs arranged for well-
qualified teachers of color, including her own daughter, Louisa, to teach at what was ultimately
named the Jacobs School in honor of her contributions, both financial and ideological.

“Proudly, the New England Freedman’s Aid Society displayed the
albumin photograph and had copies made for the local organizations supporting the Jacobs
School in Alexandria. The picture had a prominent place in their offices, then was lost for a
hundred years. It has only recently be found”

Yellin Harriet Jacobs 185

Shortly after the end of the war, Jacobs visited Richmond, Virginia and Savannah, Georgia, continuing her aid work where she saw the greatest need. In Savannah, she and Louisa again worked to maintain a Black-led school in spite of white school leaders trying to take control. Louisa operated the Lincoln School for several years before white terrorism pushed her and her mother out of the South for fear of their safety.

Traveling to Idelwild, New York, where she had once stayed with Nathaniel Parker
Willis, Jacobs now visited him again on his deathbed. While in New York, she could renew her
connection with the Women’s National Loyal League. Years earlier, in 1863, Jacobs had been
“unanimously elected … to their executive committee” after “open[ing] the meeting with a prayer
for victory and emancipation, ‘invoking the Almighty to save the nation and free the slave’”
(Yellin Harriet Jacobs 175, 176). Now, in 1867, Jacobs’s daughter Louisa was inspired by
Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s speech at the League’s Eleventh National Woman’s Right
Convention and spent several months as a public lecturer as a result. Following a brief fundraising tour for ongoing efforts in Savannah, Jacobs and Louisa both returned to Boston in 1868. “During that year,” Yellin reports, “Jacobs worked for the New England Women’s Club, the group concern[ing] itself with a wide range of social reforms” (218), but before the year was over, she decided to pursue other projects more closely aligned to what she herself believed.

Throughout the late 1860s, much of the 1870s, and into her later life, Jacobs ran a series
of boardinghouses across the northeast, where she met both powerful and impoverished
residents. Whenever she was able, Jacobs traveled to meetings with other activists and met
numerous influential contemporaries. Returning to Washington, DC, Jacobs lived the last years
of her life in the care of her daughter. Following her death in 1897, Yellin contends, Jacobs was
already being forgotten, having “outived her generation” (Harriet Jacobs 261, 259). Still,
Jacobs’s recovery – thanks in large part to Yellin herself – has been thorough and serves as an
example of what can be brought back to light with dutiful attention to literary recovery.

The Woman’s Department of the 1884 New Orleans World’s Fair represents an exclusionary
space based on a definition of “woman” defined by whiteness, a fact bolstered by the
Department’s failure to join forces with Black women also presenting at the fair. In Foster and
Yarborough’s introduction to Incidents, they write, “As a full-length narrative by a formerly
enslaved woman,” Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl “challenges the acceptance of narratives
by formerly enslaved men as representing all enslaved people” (Foster xix). Indeed, as Braxton
also underscores, by writing a slave narrative, Jacobs appropriated a genre that historically
privileged male writers. In addition to challenging the Black male narrator’s presumption to
represent all enslaved people, however, Jacobs’s work also exposes the inadequacy of the
category of (white) womanhood. She writes within the rhetorical conventions associated with
white femininity for political purposes, crafting a Black narrator with whom white women could
relate on the basis of shared values but also emphasizing the limits and privileges of the cult of
white feminine purity. While Jacobs was not physically present at the 1884 New Orleans
World’s Fair, she was alive the year it happened and her literary work challenges the
exclusionary structures enacted by its Woman’s Department. We chose to include her in our
literary project of recovery to contribute to and encourage ongoing analysis of Jacobs’s literary
and historical significance, and because her contributions are deeply important to interrogation of
the Woman’s Department and its exclusionary practice.

Works Cited 

Andrews, William L. “Harriet A. Jacobs (Harriet Ann), 1813-1897.” Documenting the
American South, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill,
https://docsouth.unc.edu/fpn/jacobs/bio.html.

Braxton, Joanne M. “Harriet Jacobs’ ‘Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl’: The Re-
Definition of the Slave Narrative Genre.” The Massachusetts Review, vol. 27, no.
2, 1986, pp. 379–87. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/25089772.

Jacobs, Harriet. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, edited by Frances Smith Foster and
Richard Yarborough, W. W. Norton & Co., 2019.

Foster, Francis Smith and Richard Yarborough. “Introduction.” Incidents in the Life of a
Slave Girl, W. W. Norton & Co., 2019, pp. vii-xix.

Li, Stephanie. “Motherhood as Resistance in Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a
Slave Girl.” Legacy, vol. 23, no. 1, 2006, pp. 14–29. JSTOR,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/25684492.

Nudelman, Franny. “Harriet Jacobs and the Sentimental Politics of Female Suffering.” ELH, vol.
59, no. 4, 1992, pp. 939–64. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/2873301.

Yellin, Jean Fagan. “Harriet Ann Jacobs (c. 1813-1897).” Legacy, vol. 5, no. 2, 1988, pp.
55–61. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/25679033.

—. Harriet Jacobs: A Life. Basic Civitas Books. 2004.

—. “Written by Herself: Harriet Jacobs’ Slave Narrative.” American Literature, vol. 53,
no. 3, 1981, pp. 479–86. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/29