Harriet Ann Jacobs

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself (Dodo Press) Harriet Ann Jacobs

By the American abolitionist and writer who was born to slaves in North Carolina. Her autobiographical accounts started being published in serial form in the New York Tribune. However, 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. In 1861, she published Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself, under the pseudonym Linda Brent. Much of the book is devoted to her struggle to free her two children. She changed the names of all characters, including her own, in order to conceal true identities. Jacobs argued that the cruelty of slavery destroyed the virtue of an entire society, and "is a curse to the whites as well as to the blacks".