Published in 1861 under the pseudonym Linda Brent, Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself is a powerful and complex autobiography in which she recorded and reflected on her life as a slave. Now considered a major work in the slave-narrative tradition, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl received little scholarly attention from historians and literary critics until 1981, at least in part because modern scholars had doubts about its authenticity and authorship. In 1981, however, drawing on a group of Jacobs's letters as evidence, Jean Fagan Yellin laid to rest any questions about Jacobs's authorship of the text. Then, through extensive research, which she documented in her 1987 edition of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Yellin also established the authenticity of the events Jacobs described in her autobiography. Since that time Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl has...