This is the only collection of papers of an African American woman
held in slavery.Although millions of African American women were
held in bondage over the 250 years that slavery was legal in the
United States, Harriet Jacobs (1813-97) is the only one known to
have left papers testifying to her life. Her autobiography,
""Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl"", holds a central place in
the canon of American literature as the most important slave
narrative by an African American woman.Born in Edenton, North
Carolina, Jacobs escaped from her owner in her mid-twenties and hid
in the cramped attic crawlspace of her grandmother's house for
seven years before making her way north as a fugitive slave. In
Rochester, New York, she became an active abolitionist, working
with all of the major abolitionists, feminists, and literary
figures of her day, including Frederick Douglass, Lydia Maria
Child, Amy Post, William Lloyd Garrison, Susan B. Anthony, Harriet
Beecher Stowe, Fanny Fern, William C. Nell, Charlotte Forten
Grimke, and Nathan Parker Willis.Jean Fagan Yellin has devoted much
of her professional life to illuminating the remarkable life of
Harriet Jacobs. Over three decades of painstaking research, Yellin
has discovered more than 900 primary source documents,
approximately 300 of which are now collected in two volumes. These
letters and papers written by, for, and about Jacobs and her
activist brother and daughter provide for the thousands of readers
of Incidents - from scholars to schoolchildren - access to the rich
historical context of Jacobs' struggles against slavery, racism,
and sexism beyond what she reveals in her pseudonymous narrative.
Accompanied by a CD containing a searchable PDF file of the entire
contents, this collection is an essential launching point for
future scholarship on Jacobs' life and times.
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