Harriet Jacobs : a life

Author(s)

Bibliographic Information

Harriet Jacobs : a life

Jean Fagan Yellin

Basic Civitas Books, c2004

  • : hardcover
  • : paperback

Available at  / 7 libraries

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Note

Includes bibliographical references (p. 369-376) and index

Description and Table of Contents

Volume

: hardcover ISBN 9780465092888

Description

For the first time--the complete story of the life and times of the most important black woman writer of the nineteenth century. In this remarkable biography, Jean Fagan Yellin recounts the full adventures of Harriet Jacobs, before and after slavery. Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl , one of the most widely read slave narratives of all time, recounts through the pseudonymous character named "Linda" the adventures of a young female slave who spent seven years in her grandmother's attic hiding from her sexually abusive and cruel master. Jean Yellin takes us inside that attic with Harriet Jacobs and then follows her on her escape to the North, where she found safe haven with Quaker abolitionists. Drawing upon decades of original research with never-before-seen archival sources, Yellin creates a complete picture of the events that inspired Incidents and offers the first rounded picture of Jacobs's life in the thirty-six years after the book's publication. Harrassed by her former owner, living under threat of recapture until the end of the Civil War, Jacobs survived poverty, ran a boarding house, and built a career as a political writer and speaker, struggling all the while to provide for her family. Jean Yellin brings to life the struggles and triumphs of this extraordinary woman whose life reflected all the major changes of the nineteenth century, from slavery to the Civil War to Reconstruction to the origins of the modern Civil Rights movement.
Volume

: paperback ISBN 9780465092895

Description

Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl remains the most-read woman's slave narrative of all time. Jean Fagan Yellin recounts the experiences that shaped Incidents-the years Jacobs spent hiding in her grandmother's attic from her sexually abusive master-as well as illuminating the wider world into which Jacobs escaped. Yellin's ground-breaking scholarship restores a life whose sorrows and triumphs reflect the history of the nineteenth century, from slavery to the Civil War, to Reconstruction and beyond. Winner of the 2004 Frederick Douglass Prize, presented by Yale University's Gilder-Lehrman centre for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, awarded to the year's best non-fiction book on slavery, resistance and abolition, the most prestigious award for the study of the black experience.

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