Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is the first full-length narrative written by a former woman slave in America.
The text is that of the 1861 first edition. Contexts includes contemporary responses to Incidents, selections from Jacobs's other published writings, and extracts from her correspondence. Criticism includes eleven important assessments of the narrative, contributed by Jean Fagan Yellin, Ann Taves, Valerie Smith, Nellie Y. McKay, Harryette Mullen, Michelle Burnham, Nell Irvin Painter, Frances Smith Foster, Sandra Gunning, Elizabeth V. Spelman, and Christine Accomando. A Chronology and Selected Bibliography are included.
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 (Ph.D. University of California, San Diego), Editor, The Literature of the Reconstruction to the New Negro Renaissance; Co-Editor, The Literature of Slavery and Freedom. Charles Howard Candler Professor of English and Women’s Studies, Emory University. 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. Co-editor of the Oxford Companion to African American Literature and Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. 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.
Nellie Y. McKay (Ph.D. Harvard), General Editor. Professor of American and Afro-American Literature, University of Wisconsin, Madison. Associate editor of the African American Review; author of Jean Toomer―the Artist: A Study of His Literary Life and Work, 1894–1936; editor of Critical Essays on Toni Morrison; co-editor of the Norton Critical Edition of Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Beloved―A Casebook, and Approaches to Teaching the Novels of Toni Morrison.
