Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Written by Herself

Harriet Jacobs is best known for her memoir, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), which she wrote under the pseudonym Linda Brent. Jacobs' work chronicles the horrors of slavery from a female perspective, highlighting the sexual exploitation and violence that plagued her daily existence as a slave in North Carolina. Jacobs herself only escaped to the North after hiding for seven years in her grandmother's house; entombed in a tiny crawl-space, she would peek out at her children as they played.