Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

Title: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
Author: Harriet Ann Jacobs
Release: 2015-06-23
Kind: ebook
Genre: History, Books, U.S. History, Biographies & Memoirs, Nonfiction, Social Science
Size: 1996253
After hiding in her grandmother’s attic for seven years, Harriet Ann Jacobs was finally able to escape servitude—and her master’s sexual abuse—when she fled to the North. Once there, she became a very active abolitionist, and her correspondence with Harriet Beecher Stowe inspired her to write Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl about her years as a slave.

She published the narrative in 1861 under the pseudonym Linda Brent, and the book was written as a novel with fictionalized characters to protect Jacobs from retribution by her former owners. (Dr. Flint, i.e., the real Dr. James Norcom, is Linda Brent’s master in the novel.) The story emphasized certain negative aspects of slavery—especially the struggles of female slaves under sexually abusive masters, cruel mistresses, and the sale of their children—in order to play on the sympathies of white middle-class women in the North.

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl was published at the beginning of the American Civil War. It contributed to the Union’s and abolitionists’ war effort, but is today seen as an important first-hand account from an escaped slave woman and an important abolitionist. After the Civil War, Jacobs continued to support the African-American cause, particularly education, until her death in 1897.

Skyhorse Publishing, along with our Arcade, Good Books, Sports Publishing, and Yucca imprints, is proud to publish a broad range of biographies, autobiographies, and memoirs. Our list includes biographies on well-known historical figures like Benjamin Franklin, Nelson Mandela, and Alexander Graham Bell, as well as villains from history, such as Heinrich Himmler, John Wayne Gacy, and O. J. Simpson. We have also published survivor stories of World War II, memoirs about overcoming adversity, first-hand tales of adventure, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.

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Harriet Ann Jacobs & Harriet Jacobs
William Wells Brown, Harriet E. Wilson, Nella Larsen, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Charles W. Chesnutt, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Frances E. W. Harper, Langston Hughes, Phillis Wheatley, Solomon Northup, Frederick Douglass, Jean Toomer, Countee Cullen, Olaudah Equiano, Mary Prince, Charles Ball, Josiah Henson, Harriet Ann Jacobs, Elizabeth Keckley, Louis Hughes, Booker T. Washington, Henry Box Brown, James Hambleton Christian, Theophilus Collins, Seth Concklin, Charles Gilbert, Samuel Green, Jamie Griffin, Harry Grimes, John Henry Hill, Jane Johnson, Matilda Mahoney, Mary Frances Melvin, Aunt Hannah Moore, Alfred S. Thornton & W. E. B. Du Bois
Solomon Northup, Booker T. Washington, Frederick Douglass, Olaudah Equiano, Harriet Ann Jacobs, Mary Prince, Charles Bal, Thomas H. Jones, Phillis Wheatley, William H. Robinson, Louis Hughes, Elizabeth Keckley, Josiah Henson, Old Elizabeth, Annie L. Burton, Lucy A. Delaney, Lunsford Lane & L. S. Thompson
Frederick Douglass, Harriet Ann Jacobs, Booker Taliaferro Washington & W. E. B. Du Bois
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