Harriet Jacobs

As described in her narrative, Harriet Jacobs was born a slave in South Carolina and eventually escaped to New York, where she was reunited with her two children. While working as a nurse in the Willis family (named the Bruces in this narrative) Harriet began to write about her life, encouraged by her friend Amy Post, a noted Quaker abolitionist. In 1861, just as the Civil War was starting, she published Incidents under a pseudonym, Linda Brent. As the book became popular, Jacobs began to give lectures and returned to the South to organize food and housing for escaped slaves and black refugees from the war. By the end of the war, she had concentrated her efforts on building schools to educate freed slaves and their children. She continued this work in the decades after the war alongside her daughter Louisa, who had trained as a teacher. After the Civil War, Incidents fell out of print; because it was written under a pseudonym, scholars believed it to be a novel. In the 1970s and 1980s, feminist historian Jean Fagan Yellin proved it was in fact a memoir and brought it and its author back into the public eye, making it one of the most well-known slave narratives.