Harriet Ann Jacobs (c. 1813-1897) was born enslaved in Edenton, North Carolina. After years of pursuit by the physician who held her, she hid for nearly seven years in a crawlspace above a shed at her free grandmother's house, escaped by ship to the North in 1842, and worked in New York as a nurse in the household of the writer Nathaniel Parker Willis, whose second wife purchased her freedom in 1852. Encouraged by the Quaker abolitionist Amy Post, she wrote her narrative under the name Linda Brent. During and after the Civil War she did relief and school work among freedpeople in Alexandria, Virginia, and Savannah, Georgia, and she died in Washington, D.C.
Frequently Cited
“Reader, be assured this narrative is no fiction.”
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is Harriet Jacobs's account of her life in slavery and escape, told under the name Linda Brent with the names of people and places changed. Linda grows up in a North Carolina town believing herself free until, at six, her mother dies and she learns she is a slave.
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