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Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
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Frontispiece of the first edition
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is a book that was published in 1861 by Harriet Jacobs, using the pen name "Linda Brent". While on one level it chronicles the experiences of Harriet Jacobs as a slave, and the various humiliations she had to endure in that unhappy state, it also deals with the particular tortures visited on women at her station. Often in the book, she will point to a particular punishment that a male slave will endure at the hands of slave holders, and comment that, although she finds the punishment brutal in the extreme, it cannot compare to the abuse that a young woman must face while still on the cusp of girlhood.
Incidents in the Life of Slave Girl is considered a slave narrative. Portions of it were first published in serial form before being published as a complete work in 1861, after some difficulty finding a publisher. It is also considered an example of feminist literature.
Publication and response
Jacobs began composing Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl while living and working at Idlewild, the Hudson River home of writer and publisher Nathaniel Parker Willis,[1] who was fictionalized in the book as Mr. Bruce.[2] Portions of the book were published in serial form in the New York Tribune, owned and edited by Horace Greeley. Her reports of sexual abuse were considered too shocking to the average newspaper reader of the day, and publication ceased before the completion of the narrative.
Boston publishing house Phillips and Samson agreed to print the work in book-form — if Jacobs could convince Willis or Harriet Beecher Stowe to provide a preface. She refused to ask Willis for help and Stowe turned her down, though the Phillips and Samson company closed shop anyway.[3] She eventually managed to sign an agreement with the Thayer and Eldridge publishing house and they requested a preface by Lydia Maria Child.[3] Child also edited the book and the company introduced her to Jacobs. The two women would remain in contact for much of their remaining lives. Thayer and Eldridge, however, declared bankruptcy before the narrative could be published. The narrative in its final form was published by a Boston, Massachusetts publisher in 1861.
Abby Kelley praised the book for its "simple and attractive style". She wrote: "You feel less as though you were reading a book, than talking with the woman herself".[4] A critic for the London Anti-Slavery Associate, likely its editor Richard D. Webb, wrote: "This book shows as forcibly as any story we have ever read the moral pollution and perversion inevitable in a community were slavery is a recognized institution".[5]
References
- ^ Yellin, Jean Fagan. Harriet Jacobs: A Life. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Basic Civitas Books, 2004: 126. ISBN 0465092888
- ^ Baker, Thomas N. Nathaniel Parker Willis and the Trials of Literary Fame. New York, Oxford University Press, 2001: 4. ISBN 0-19-512073-6
- ^ a b Yellin, Jean Fagan. Harriet Jacobs: A Life. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Basic Civitas Books, 2004: 140. ISBN 0465092888
- ^ Yellin, Jean Fagan. Harriet Jacobs: A Life. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Basic Civitas Books, 2004: 146–147. ISBN 0465092888
- ^ Yellin, Jean Fagan. Harriet Jacobs: A Life. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Basic Civitas Books, 2004: 147. ISBN 0465092888
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