Harriet Jacobs: A Life - Softcover

Yellin, Jean Fagan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0465092896 ISBN 13: 9780465092895

Publisher: Civitas Books, 2005

Synopsis

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 groundbreaking 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 Center 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.

About this title

About the Author:

Jean Fagan Yellin is the author of Women and Sisters and The Intricate Knot. She divides her time between Goldens Bridge, New York, and Sarasota, Florida.

From Publishers Weekly:

With the 1987 edition of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, originally published in 1861, Pace University English professor Yellin recovered the real identity of the author behind the pseudonymous Linda Brent: Harriet Jacobs (1813-1897). With this deeply documented and thoroughly engaging biography, she provides a vibrant account of Jacobs's remarkable lives; in a triptych structure it moves from the slave girl, Hatty, to the writer, Linda, to the activist, Mrs. Jacobs. Yellin clarifies error and memory lapse without argument and frames the speculative responsibly. The first life is the best known: Hatty spends nearly seven years hiding in her grandmother's attic to escape the attentions, threats and abuse of her de facto owner. Where Jacobs omitted what "might detract from the story of her freedom struggle," Yellin goes behind her narrative's foreground (the terror of slavery, particularly for women) to restore "all the extras." Dimension and history are given to the Jacobs family and the Norcross family, as well as the Edenton, N.C., community they share. With the second life, Linda's, Yellin delineates the writing, publishing, marketing and reception of Incidents, as she traces Linda's service to and friendship with Cornelia Willis and Amy Post. In the third and least known of the lives, Yellin recounts the postbellum Mrs. Jacobs, who returned South to do relief work during the Civil War, struggled to establish schools and asylums for the black refugees and saw the rise of peonage, Jim Crow and Klan violence. Incidents presented a life of much isolation; Yellin's work recreates its rich milieu, delving deeply into Jacobs's connections to the literary and abolitionist worlds, tracing the full history of her daughter and her brother. This scholarly account, woven in a reader friendly fashion, restores "an heroic woman who lived in an heroic time" to history and to us. Photos.
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About this edition

• Publisher: Civitas Books
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0465092896
• ISBN 13: 9780465092895
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 432