Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

Harriet Jacobs was born in Edenton, North Carolina, in 1813, to slave parents. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, the first full-length narrative written by a former slave woman in America, is a record of events and experiences of slavery seen through the eyes of the young Harriet during the years she lived in captivity in Edenton, through her escape, when she becomes a fugitive in the North at age twenty-nine, and concluding soon after a northern white friend buys her freedom in 1852. Frances Smith Foster is the Charles Howard Candler Professor of English and Women’s Studies at Emory University. She is the Editor of The Literature of the Reconstruction to the New Negro Renaissance and co-editor of The Literature of Slavery and Freedom. She is the author of “Til Death or Distance Do Us Part”: Love and Marriage in African America; Written by Herself: Literary Production by African American Women, 1746–1892; and Witnessing Slavery: The Development of the Antebellum Slave Narrative. She is co-editor of The Oxford Companion to African American Literature and Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and editor of several works, including Love and Marriage in Early African America; Minnie’s Sacrifice, Sowing and Reaping, Trial and Triumph: Three Rediscovered Novels by Frances Ellen Watkins Harper; Elizabeth Keckley’s Behind the Scenes; and the Norton Critical Edition of Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.