Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself

Harriet A. Jacobs was not an ordinary slave girl, and her autobiography is not an ordinary account of the miseries of slavery. She was a slave who triumphed not only by luck or piety or passivity but by skillful planning and effective deceit...Excellent introduction...Even for those who have read extensively about the South's peculiar institution, this autobiography of a slave will not easily be forgotten. -- American Heritage

Of these female slave narratives, Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself is the crowning achievement. Manifesting a command of rhetorical and narrative strategies rivaled only by that of Frederick Douglass, Jacobs's autobiography is one of the major works of Afro-American literature...Jacobs's narrative is a bold and gripping fusion of two major literary forms: she borrowed from the popular sentimental novel on one hand, and the slave narrative genre on the other. Her tale gains itsimportance from the fact that she charts, in great and painful detail, the sexual exploitation that daily haunted her life--and the life of every other black female slave...Ms. Yellin's superbly researched edition insures that Harriet Jacobs will never be lost again. --Henry Louis Gates, Jr., New York Times Book Review

[The book] is a major work in the canon of writing by Afro-American women...Jacobs's book--reaching across the gulf separating black women from white, slave from free, poor from rich, 'bad' women from 'good'--represents an early attempt to establish an American sisterhood. --Wayne Lionel Aponte, Nation