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Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

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Brief Description
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is the stirring autobiography of Harriet Jacobs, a mother and fugitive slave. It details her harrowing escape from slavery and her seven years hiding in an attic crawl space, as well as the racism she faced in freedom.... Read More
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Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is the stirring autobiography of Harriet Jacobs, a mother and fugitive slave. It details her harrowing escape from slavery and her seven years hiding in an attic crawl space, as well as the racism she faced in freedom.

The Norton Library edition presents the text of the first (1861) edition, with explanatory endnotes and an introduction by Evie Shockley.

Series: The Norton Library

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  • Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
    Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is the stirring autobiography of Harriet Jacobs, a mother and fugitive slave. It details her harrowing escape from slavery and her seven years hiding in an attic crawl space, as well as the racism she faced in freedom. The Norton Library edition presents the text of the first (1861) edition, with explanatory...
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Book Details

INFORMATION

ISBN: 9780393870787

Publisher: WW Norton & Co

Format: Paperback / softback

Date Published: 02 September 2025

Country: United States

Imprint: WW Norton & Co

Contributors:

  • Edited by Evie Shockley
  • Edited by Evie Shockley

Audience: Tertiary education

DIMENSIONS

Spine width: 15.0mm

Width: 127.0mm

Height: 196.0mm

Weight: 182g

Pages: 272

About the Author

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. Evie Shockley is the Zora Neale Hurston Distinguished Professor of English at Rutgers University and the author of Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry. For her poetry collectionsβ€”including suddenly we, semiautomatic, the new black, and a half-red seaβ€”she has been awarded the Shelley Memorial Award, the Lannan Literary Award, and the Holmes National Poetry Prize, has twice won the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, has received an NAACP Image Award, and has been named a finalist for the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and the LA Times Book Prize. She has served as an editor of jubilat and Feminist Studies, and is Editor for Poetry at Contemporary Literature.

Also by Harriet Jacobs

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  • Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (Hero Classics)
    Reader, did you ever hate? I hope not. I never did but once; and I trust I never shall again. Somebody has called it "the atmosphere of hell"; and I believe it is so. First published in 1861 under a pseudonym, this is the autobiography of Harriet Jacobs, a mother, fugitive, and slave. The book outlines her life, the struggles...
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  • Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
    One of the central firsthand accounts of slavery in America A haunting, evocative recounting of her life as a slave in North Carolina and of her final escape and emancipation, Harriet Jacobs's classic narrative, written between 1853 and 1858 and published pseudonymously in 1861, tells firsthand of the horrors inflicted on slaves. In writing this extraordinary memoir, which culminates in...
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    One of hundreds of slave narratives published just before the Civil War, this account is unique in that it is written by a woman. This offers a different, perhaps more realistic, perspective on slave experience than that presented in the more typical 'heroic' male narrative. The work is notable for its blending and manipulation of several narrative techniques, including those...
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    Not only one of the last of over one hundred slave narratives published separately before the Civil War, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) is also one of the few existing narratives written by a woman. It offers a unique perspective on the complex plight of the black woman as slave and as writer. In a story...
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