Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
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Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is the stirring autobiography of Harriet Jacobs, a mother and fugitive slave, detailing her harrowing escape from slavery and seven years hiding in an attic crawl space and 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.
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 collections—including suddenly we, semiautomatic, the new black, and a half-red sea—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.