Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

Published in 1861 under the pseudonym "Linda Brent," with abolitionist Lydia Maria Child as editor, Jacobs's narrative remains the fullest first-person account by a formerly enslaved woman to center what other slave narratives of the era — most written by men — rarely addressed directly: the sexual coercion enslaved women faced, and the impossible calculus of protecting children who were legally another person's property. It is also a work of real narrative craft: nearly seven years spent hidden in a nine-by-seven-foot garret before an escape north, told with a novelist's control of suspense and a witness's care for evidence, because Jacobs knew a Northern audience was primed to doubt her.