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Summary
Summary
In this remarkable biography, Jean Fagan Yellin recounts the full adventures of Harriet Jacobs, before and after slavery. Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl , one of the most widely read slave narratives of all time, recounts through the pseudonymous character named "Linda" the adventures of a young female slave who spent seven years in her grandmother's attic hiding from her sexually abusive and cruel master. Jean Yellin takes us inside that attic with Harriet Jacobs and then follows her on her escape to the North, where she found safe haven with Quaker abolitionists.Drawing upon decades of original research with never-before-seen archival sources, Yellin creates a complete picture of the events that inspired Incidents and offers the first rounded picture of Jacobs's life in the thirty-six years after the book's publication. Harrassed by her former owner, living under threat of recapture until the end of the Civil War, Jacobs survived poverty, ran a boarding house, and built a career as a political writer and speaker, struggling all the while to provide for her family. Jean Yellin brings to life the struggles and triumphs of this extraordinary woman whose life reflected all the major changes of the nineteenth century, from slavery to the Civil War to Reconstruction to the origins of the modern Civil Rights movement.
Author Notes
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.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
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. Author tour. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
The authorship of the slave narrative Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) was enigmatic, although the text was widely read, until Yellin's research in the late 1970s conclusively named Harriet Jacobs the author. Yellin's recent research has involved investigating Jacobs' life. The product of her research, this selection, is a meticulously researched and fluidly narrated biography of the woman who both lived and wrote Incidents. More than simply drawing connections between true circumstances in Jacobs' life and the events in Incidents, this biography stands on its own as the story of an oppressed slave turned engaged citizen, and especially as an account of Jacobs' impressive achievements as a free person after the Civil War: running a boardinghouse, becoming politically and socially active, traveling, having a family. It also doubles as a contribution to nineteenth-century gender history. Yellin's 20 years of research have clearly paid off and are apparently not yet over: a scholarly compilation of Jacobs' personal papers, including correspondence with other feminist and abolitionist reformers, is presently being prepared. --Brendan Driscoll Copyright 2003 Booklist
Choice Review
Like many self-emancipated slaves, Harriet Jacobs is best known through the slave narrative she published on the eve of the Civil War. Her harrowing tale of seven years spent hiding from a sexually predatory master seemed so fantastic that as recently as a generation ago, it was seen as the probably fictional creation of white abolitionist Lydia Maria Child. Yellin's two decade long search for materials on Jacobs, however, demonstrates conclusively the fundamental truth of the narrative; reveals the pseudonymous individuals and places mentioned; and proves further that the remainder of Jacobs's life showed a continued commitment to personal independence and service to her family and African Americans generally. Yellin (emer., Pace Univ.) has written an absorbing narrative that embraces both the personal psychology of this extraordinary yet ordinary woman, and the society in which she lived and struggled. Readers will find fascinating the detective work revealed in the notes, as well as the photos, some long lost, that show Jacobs's school for freedmen, her family, her needlework, and more. Scholars will find valuable information on the networks that bound social reformers together for a lifetime. ^BSumming Up: Highly recommended. All public as well as academic libraries. P. F. Field Ohio University
Kirkus Review
Graceful, honorable portrait, extensively documented and annotated, of the woman who wrote Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Yellin, who previously edited a modern edition of Jacobs's 1861 classic, makes no bones about being an Old Lefty and, out of that tradition, being drawn to the powerful slave narrative. Many scholars have cast doubt on the authenticity of the book's story and questioned whether Jacobs actually wrote it; Yellin dug deep, pulling together her subject's extant letters (of which there are a gratifyingly substantial number) and deciphering the names of the real characters behind the pseudonyms. She makes it clear where the evidence is scant, but finds a syntactical identity between the letters and the narrative. Yellin fixes Jacobs's early experiences in the social history of Edenton, North Carolina, home to freeborn, emancipated, and slave populations, as well as the white families for whom she worked. The author is rightly wowed by a woman who learned to read despite anti-literacy laws and, unlike Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth, actually wrote her own autobiography--with the help of Lydia Maria Child, granted, but in her own words. During the Civil War, Jacobs did relief work for refugees and the poor and wrote about it for Northern newspapers. Later, she helped establish schools, gardens, orphanages, and old-folk homes, operating at ground level as an activist in the true sense, as strong a resister of racism as the ex-slave desperadoes of the antebellum South. Yellin displays a pleasing and unusual ability to be both euphonious and punchy as she weds Jacobs's story to the politics of the times: Nat Turner and David Walker's Appeal, Frederick Douglass's North Star, and Samuel Cornish's Rights of All. In her final years, Jacobs ran boardinghouses, fed the poor, even worked cleaning houses, always engaged with life on a fundamental level. Yellin's fine reconstruction of an impressive personality should firmly embed Jacobs in American cultural history. (16-page b&w photo insert, not seen) Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Harriet Jacobs explained that in writing her autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, she had "striven faithfully to give a true and just account of [her] own life in slavery." Yellin, biographer of Jacobs and editor of the most recent edition of Incidents, here presents a powerful account of Jacobs's life after many years of research. Jacobs is portrayed as a remarkable woman who, until recently, was largely lost to American memory. Consulting correspondence, diaries, family papers, government records, and newspaper accounts, Yellin pieces together Jacobs's story, paying special attention to the forces that shaped her long life and work, such as her grandmother Molly and her brother John, the Civil War and Reconstruction, the antislavery movement, and the women's rights movement. As Yellin ascertains, Jacobs deserves to be recognized for many reasons: for authoring and publishing a narrative that "became a weapon in the struggle for emancipation," for freeing herself and her children, for working with black refugees in the South during the Civil War, for establishing schools and hospitals, and for working to further the Equal Rights Amendment. The Harriet Jacobs that emerges is, in her own words, "a soul that burned for freedom and heart nerved with determination to suffer even unto death in pursuit of that liberty which without makes life an intolerable burden." Highly recommended for academic libraries.-Kathryn R. Bartelt, Univ. of Evansville Libs., IN (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
