SOURCE: "To Write My Self: The Autobiographies of Afro-American Women," in Feminist Issues in Literary Scholarship, edited by Shari Benstock, Indiana University Press, 1987, pp. 161-80.

In the following excerpt, Fox-Genovese explores the differences in tone and content between Incidents and other works of sentimental domestic literature.

. . . Harriet Jacobs, in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, left no doubt about whom she thought she was writing for: "O, you happy free women, contrast your New Year's day with that of the poor bond-woman!" (14).

Jacobs wrote, at least in part, to introduce the world to the special horrors of slavery for women. To achieve her goal, she sought to touch the hearts of northern white women and, accordingly, wrote to the extent possible in their idiom. She so doggedly followed the tone and model of sentimental domestic fiction, that for a long time it was assumed that her...