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

Fri, 14 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Harriet Jacobs wrote for one reader, and names her in the first pages: the free woman of the North. Her preface asks that reader to grasp the condition of two million enslaved women in the South; a sentence at the book’s center says why sympathy for men in bondage will not stretch to cover it. Slavery is terrible for men, she writes, but “far more terrible for women” — on top of the burden everyone carries, women have wrongs and mortifications peculiarly their own. What she means is sexual, and the argument she builds from it goes straight at her reader’s idea of virtue.

Harriet Jacobs on SummaryShelf

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