Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.
Inscribed by Lydia Maria Child
To Her Brother
[Jacobs, Harriet Ann]. Child, L. Maria, ed. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Written by Herself. Edited by L. Maria Child. Boston: Published for the Author, 1861.
12mo.; morocco-grained pebbled linen and marble boards, with hand-lettered paper spine label; slightly cocked; light edge wear; a bright, tight copy. In a specially made quarter-morocco slipcase.
First edition of “the major antebellum autobiography of a black woman” (LCP 191). The 306 page narrative was reprinted in England as The Deeper Wrong: Or, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1862). Blockson 9554; LCP 191. A significant family presentation copy, inscribed by Child to her brother Convers Francis: Convers Francis / from his affectionate sister / L. Maria Child / Jan. 1861. Child credited Convers—a radical Unitarian, a member of the Transcendentalist Club, and a Harvard theology professor—with inspiring her career.
“I have not written my experiences in order to attract attention to myself; on the contrary,” Harriet Ann Jacobs reassured would‑be readers in her author’s preface, signed with the name she was born to, “Linda Brent”: “I do earnestly desire to arouse the women of the North to a realizing sense of the condition of two millions of women at the South, still in bondage. . . . Only by experience can any one realize how deep, and dark, and foul is that pit of abominations.” Jacobs spent the rest of her life agitating for black and feminist causes; in particular she worked against the sort of sexual exploitation she herself had suffered. She eventually established a school for black refugees.
Published in 1861, the didactic Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl was long assumed to be a doctored account, largely written by abolitionist-suffrage activist Lydia Maria Child (who is listed as the volume’s editor). It was not officially determined until the late 1980s—through the careful detective work of various feminist and African American scholars—that “Harriet Jacobs” had in fact existed and had authored her own account (“Reflections on Black Women Writers: Revising the Literary Canon,” by Nellie McKay, in Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism, Robyn Warhol and Diane Herndl, eds., New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1991, pp. 249-61). The initial reasons for doubts about the authenticity of the Jacobs account are attributable, ironically, to the power of the narrative itself. Never before had a black American woman written so convincingly of her experiences of sexual, racial, and gender-based oppression within the brutal slavery system.
Readers were willing, even inclined, to disregard the particular indignities recounted by Jacobs (rape and sexual harassment by her white master; forced motherhood; physical and emotional punishments for purported misdeeds) as perhaps too horrific; they also found Jacobs’s account of her various forms of resistance to these indignities (escape, pursuit, capture, re-escape, and eventual freedom; her articulation of her tale, first in the Northern abolitionist press and then in book form; her growing involvement in the abolitionist and suffrage movements) too remarkable to be taken at face value. In 1987, however, by perusing a cache of letters recently acquired by the University of Rochester, historian Linda Yellin was able to verify that “[what] may be the first full-length slave narrative by a woman to be published in this country” was indeed written by Jacobs, an ex-slave born in 1813 (Introduction, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, by Yellin, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987).
Jacobs (1813–1897), born “Linda Brent,” spent most of her life as a slave in North Carolina, under the watch of a cruel and licentious master. She had children by another white man (and also, perhaps, by her master), and eventually escaped to the home of her grandmother, a freed slave, under whose protection she lived for sev
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