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

Harriet Jacobs lived from 1813 to 1897. She was born into slavery in North Carolina, escaped in 1842, and eventually found safety in the North, where she worked as an abolitionist and, during and after the Civil War, as a relief worker among former slaves. Her autobiography, written under the pseudonym Linda Brent, appeared in 1861, edited by the white writer and abolitionist Lydia Maria Child. For a long time its authenticity was doubted, until research in the 1980s established that Jacobs was indeed the author.

Part of the narrative was first printed in the New York Tribune, but the series was stopped because Jacobs’s frank account of the sexual exploitation of enslaved women was thought too shocking for the public. She wrote with the purpose of telling Northern women, in particular, what slavery meant for mothers and daughters. The book describes her seven years in a tiny space in her grandmother’s house, an episode that has become one of the best-known parts of the story.

The text is organised in short chapters, with titles such as “Childhood” and “The New Master and Mistress”, and moves with a clear sense of purpose. Names and places were changed to protect those still at risk, a practice common among authors of such narratives.

The recording has 43 chapters, starting with an introduction, and lasts about seven hours and fifty minutes. A single LibriVox volunteer reads it. It is an essential work for anyone who wishes to understand slavery as it was experienced and written about by someone who lived it, and its power has not faded. The narrative is written in clear, forceful prose, and hearing it aloud conveys the author’s urgency and her determination to be believed.