Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
by Harriet Jacobs | Grades 8-12
Driven by the horrors of slavery and fear of a predatory master, Harriet Jacobs, a young black woman, makes the fateful, life-altering decision to escape. Long thought to be the work of a white writer, Incidents In The Life Of A Slave Girl is the captivating and terrifying story of Jacobs's daily life on a plantation in North Carolina, her seven years of hiding, and her ultimate triumph.
Jacobs wrote her autobiography in 1861, under a pseudonym to protect the lives of the friends and family she left behind, and the work had been essentially lost until the mid-twentieth century. Now recognized as a classic, unflinching portrait of slave life, Incidents exposes slavery on a level comparable only to that of the Narrative Of Frederick Douglass.