SOURCE: "Meditations on History: The Slave Woman's Voice," in Invented Lives: Narratives of Black Women, 1860-1960, Anchor Press, 1987, pp. 3-15.

In the following essay, Washington analyzes Jacobs's use of the sentimental domestic genre, noting that this was "a poor choice for her story," and emphasizes that Incidents reads more as a slave narrative than a sentimental novel, particularly in the way in which it transcends the boundaries of gender.

In 1861, with the help of two white abolitionists, Amy Post and Lydia Maria Child, Harriet Jacobs, abolitionist and exslave, published under the pseudonym, Linda Brent, an account of her life in slavery called Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, one of the few slave narratives written by a woman.¹ Working in New York as a nurse for the well-known magazinist, Nathaniel Parker Willis, Jacobs had to write her autobiography secretly at night when she could steal the...