Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

Summary

Writing under the name Linda Brent, Harriet Jacobs recounts her years enslaved in North Carolina, the relentless sexual harassment she endured from her owner, and the nearly seven years she spent hiding in a tiny crawl space above her grandmother's house to stay near her children. Jacobs addresses her narrative directly to Northern white women, exposing how slavery corrupted family life and made womanhood itself a source of danger. Her account remains one of the few slave narratives written by a woman and one of the most searing.