Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl was one of the first books in the slave narrative genre that spoke to the issues of sexual harassment and abuse faced by slave women.  The book is addressed to northern white women, with the underlying message that abuse of female slaves by white male masters is corrosive to the family and marriage unit.  Jacobs was urged to write her life story by her friend Amy Post and suggested she contact Harriet Beecher Stowe for help. When Stowe suggested instead that the story be part of Stowe’s own work, Jacobs started on her own account, writing secretly at night in the nursery of the home of her employer.  It was serialized in the New York Tribune and then published in 1861 in book form by Thayer and Eldridge under the pseudonym Linda Brent to protect the identity of its author, who was subject to capture and return to her owner under the terms of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Names of all the key characters were changed to protect them from harm. The release of the book in 1861 met with favorable reviews but coincided with the onset of the Civil War and the bankruptcy of the publisher, suppressing awareness and demand. After the war it was considered a novel due to the use of the pseudonym. Interest was revived in the 1970’s and 1980’s when scholar Jean Fagan Yellin confirmed the identity of the author and historians began to better understand the connection to feminist issues.

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