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

Terry Novak (Johnson and Wales University)

Ed. by Emory Elliott, University of California, Riverside, Jessica Gossling, Goldsmiths College, University of London
The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 3.2.5: African American Writing and Culture of the United States.
Vol. editors: Philathia Bolton (University of Akron), Patrick Chura (University of Akron), Emory Elliott (University of California, Riverside), A Yemisi Jimoh (University of Massachusetts Amherst), Stephen E. Meats (Pittsburg State University)

Dates

First circulation or publication 1861

Places

United States (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Non-Fiction
- Autobiography (literary)

Resources

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself is a slave narrative that has come to represent the particular horrors of life for the slave woman of the nineteenth century American South. Harriet Ann Jacobs, writing under anonymity, reveals several themes of her life in the text; these themes in turn become the themes of the text itself: sexual abuse, ownership of the black female slave by the white male slaveholder, the experience of the tragic mulatto, the deep bonds of family in the African-American community, motherhood, religious faith, and friendship between black and white women. Although Incidents is Jacobs’s own story, all of the characters’ names, including her o…

Please log in to consult the article in its entirety. If you are a member (student of staff) of a subscribing institution (see List), you should be able to access the LE on campus directly (without the need to log in), and off-campus either via the institutional log in we offer, or via your institution's remote access facilities, or by creating a personal user account with your institutional email address. If you are not a member of a subscribing institution, you will need to purchase a personal subscription. For more information on how to subscribe as an individual user, please see under Individual Subcriptions.

2577 words

Citation: Novak, Terry. "Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 16 July 2002; last revised 10 August 2020. [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=4465, accessed 21 November 2024.]

Save this article