Showing results by author "Harriet Ann Jacobs" in All Categories

Despite being born into slavery, Linda Brent enjoys a happy childhood - until the deaths of her parents and kind mistress leave her an orphan and the property of the lascivious Dr. Flint. Linda becomes the target of his unwanted advances, which she temporarily evades by bearing the children of another man. But when Dr. Flint threatens to sell her children unless she submits, Linda hatches a desperate plan to escape, working to secure her children's freedom as well as her own.

Harriet Ann Jacob's autobiography documents her life as a slave and how she attained freedom for herself and her children. Harrowing in its descriptions of sexual abuse, Jacob's slave narrative is notable for the appeal it made to abolitionist women to open their eyes to the realities of slavery. Deemed too shocking for reading audiences at the time, the book was shelved before it was published in 1861 near the start of the Civil War. 

One of the first personal narratives written by an ex-slave, this is also one of the few written by a woman. Harriet Jacobs (1813-97) was enslaved, along with her family, in North Carolina under a ruthless master who sexually harassed her. After several failed escape attempts, and several years of hiding, she finally made her way North to freedom, where she was eventually reunited with her children. The book was published in 1861.

This is the story of Harriet Ann Jacobs, a story of slavery in the 19th century, a story of terrible human suffering, and a story that, later on, played a significant role in the abolitionist movement. 19th-century Harriet represents many other slave women who need to be free like Harriet finally was. Hence, Harriet's story has been brought here as the second volume of Absurd's Slave Narrative series as a wake-up call to save the victims of slavery and to save the mankind.