Harriet Jacobs (Revised)

   In 1929, Virginia Woolf maintained, "All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn...for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds" (202).  Although Woolf did not have Harriet Jacobs in mind and Jacobs, in turn, did not have Aphra Behn in mind, one of these women might well have been the former slave who wrote Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl in the 1850s.

Of course, Jacobs used a pseudonym when she first published her life story as slavery was still legal and the Fugitive Slave Act was still in force.  Additionally,  as this teacher's guide suggests, some of her readers might have wondered whether she was the only author of her story, and readers today ask themselves how much her story draws on the "novel of seduction."  After all, Jacobs had set out to convince her audience to fight against slavery, and to do that, she had to consider them and their prejudices about women.

http://college.hmco.com/english/heath/syllabuild/iguide/jacobs.html

This site from PBS also addresses these issues more concisely:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4h2924.html

Historian Margaret Washington helps 21st century readers understand the concerns that Jacobs faced as a slave who could not marry in an era when sex outside of marriage stigmatized women:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4i3089.html


The University of Minnesota's VG/Voices from the Gaps has published a brief biography.  It touches on what Harriet Jacobs did after publishing her one and only book:
http://voices.cla.umn.edu/artistpages/jacobsHarriet.php


Or you may find this timeline to be more useful. 

http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/JACOBS/hj-timeline.htm

Literary scholar Jean Fagin Yellin recently published a book-length biography of Jacobs.  (Prof. Yellin was the scholar who rediscovered Jacobs' autobiography and proved her authorship of it.)  Here is the NY Times review of the book-length biography:

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9906E7DD1038F932A25754C0A9629C8B63

Here are some historical documents, including the runaway notice that was posted.  The second site links to a collection of Jacobs' correspondence.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4h1541.html

http://www.yale.edu/glc/harriet/docs.htm

Here is a summary of Incidents. Our anthology has not reprinted the entire work, as engaging and enthralling as it is!

http://docsouth.unc.edu/fpn/jacobs/summary.html

For a contemporary review of Incidents, go to this link:

http://www.yale.edu/glc/harriet/11.htm

Jacobs' brother John may have written his own life story as well.  In 2000, it was published with Incidents.

http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/jjacobs/summary.html

http://www.lib.unc.edu/instruct/docsouth_workshop/digital_narratives/excerpts/plantation.html

Historians consider slave narratives and evidence from slavery as sources in this issue of History Now:

http://www.historynow.org/12_2004/index.html

See this site for links to slave narratives transcribed in the 1930s:

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/slavery/resources/wpa.html

The New York Public Library's Schomburg Digital Collection contains a number of books by nineteenth-century African-American women.  Among them are Sojourner Truth's autobiography, Frances E.W. Harper's novel Iola Leroy, and several books of poetry. 

http://digilib.nypl.org/dynaweb/digs-t/@Generic__CollectionView;hf=0

While a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Texas, Melanie Ulrich put together this web site on feminism and the anti-slavery movement:

http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/~ulrich/RHE309/abolition/