Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

The most famous autobiography written by a nineteenth-century African American woman, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is a triumph of American literature and the unflinching narrative that broke the silence on the psychosexual exploitation of African-American women "I was born a slave; but I never knew it till six years of happy childhood had passed away." In clear and unshrinking prose, Harriet Jacobs--writing under the pseudonym of "Linda Brent"--relates the story of her girlhood and adolescence as a slave in North Carolina and her eventual escape: a bildungsroman set in the complex terrain of a chauvinist, white-supremacist society. Resolutely addressing women readers, rather than men, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl sought to make white women understand the ways that the threat of sexual violence shaped the lives of enslaved black women and children.

Product details

• Authors: Harriet Jacobs, Tiya Miles
• Publisher: Modern Library PRH US
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback
• Released: 02.02.2021
• EAN: 9780593230367
• ISBN: 978-0-593-23036-7
• No. of pages: 304
• Dimensions: 130 mm x 203 mm x 15 mm
• Series: Modern Library Torchbearers
• Subjects: Fiction > Narrative literature > Letters, diaries; Non-fiction book > Philosophy, religion > Biographies, autobiographies