Harriet Jacobs: A Life [Paperback]

Jean Fagan Yellin (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 15, 2005

Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl remains the most-read woman's slave narrative of all time. Jean Fagan Yellin recounts the experiences that shaped Incidents-the years Jacobs spent hiding in her grandmother's attic from her sexually abusive master-as well as illuminating the wider world into which Jacobs escaped. Yellin's groundbreaking scholarship restores a life whose sorrows and triumphs reflect the history of the nineteenth century, from slavery to the Civil War, to Reconstruction and beyond. Winner of the 2004 Frederick Douglass Prize, presented by Yale University’s Gilder-Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, awarded to the year’s best non-fiction book on slavery, resistance and abolition, the most prestigious award for the study of the black experience.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

With the 1987 edition of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, originally published in 1861, Pace University English professor Yellin recovered the real identity of the author behind the pseudonymous Linda Brent: Harriet Jacobs (1813-1897). With this deeply documented and thoroughly engaging biography, she provides a vibrant account of Jacobs's remarkable lives; in a triptych structure it moves from the slave girl, Hatty, to the writer, Linda, to the activist, Mrs. Jacobs. Yellin clarifies error and memory lapse without argument and frames the speculative responsibly. The first life is the best known: Hatty spends nearly seven years hiding in her grandmother's attic to escape the attentions, threats and abuse of her de facto owner. Where Jacobs omitted what "might detract from the story of her freedom struggle," Yellin goes behind her narrative's foreground (the terror of slavery, particularly for women) to restore "all the extras." Dimension and history are given to the Jacobs family and the Norcross family, as well as the Edenton, N.C., community they share. With the second life, Linda's, Yellin delineates the writing, publishing, marketing and reception of Incidents, as she traces Linda's service to and friendship with Cornelia Willis and Amy Post. In the third and least known of the lives, Yellin recounts the postbellum Mrs. Jacobs, who returned South to do relief work during the Civil War, struggled to establish schools and asylums for the black refugees and saw the rise of peonage, Jim Crow and Klan violence. Incidents presented a life of much isolation; Yellin's work recreates its rich milieu, delving deeply into Jacobs's connections to the literary and abolitionist worlds, tracing the full history of her daughter and her brother. This scholarly account, woven in a reader friendly fashion, restores "an heroic woman who lived in an heroic time" to history and to us. Photos.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

The authorship of the slave narrative Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) was enigmatic, although the text was widely read, until Yellin's research in the late 1970s conclusively named Harriet Jacobs the author. Yellin's recent research has involved investigating Jacobs' life. The product of her research, this selection, is a meticulously researched and fluidly narrated biography of the woman who both lived and wrote Incidents. More than simply drawing connections between true circumstances in Jacobs' life and the events in Incidents, this biography stands on its own as the story of an oppressed slave turned engaged citizen, and especially as an account of Jacobs' impressive achievements as a free person after the Civil War: running a boardinghouse, becoming politically and socially active, traveling, having a family. It also doubles as a contribution to nineteenth-century gender history. Yellin's 20 years of research have clearly paid off and are apparently not yet over: a scholarly compilation of Jacobs' personal papers, including correspondence with other feminist and abolitionist reformers, is presently being prepared. Brendan Driscoll
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 432 pages
• Publisher: Basic Civitas Books (February 15, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0465092896
• ISBN-13: 978-0465092895
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.1 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #150,513 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Great Achievement, March 14, 2004

By 

Bundy H. Boit (Penobscot, ME USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Harriet Jacobs: A Life (Hardcover)

Jean Fagan Yellin, in her book HARRIET JACOBS A LIFE, has given to all of us a monumental story of courage, determination, and perseverance. Researching Harriet Jacobs' book, INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE OF A SLAVE GIRL, must have been a daunting task for Yellin, but the scholarship she presents in her 1987 Harvard edition of INCIDENTS gives a clearer picture of the struggle Harriet Jacobs endured during her years in slavery. Now with this new book, Yellin has enlarged for all of us the life that Jacobs lived after her desperate tale in INCIDENTS. Yellin, through her meticulous and painstaking research, gives us the full dimensions of Jacobs' entire life, as a writer, and as a woman who recognized the urgency to educate those who had suffered lives in slavery.

Whenever I pick up INCIDENTS, no matter where in the entire book, I feel empowered by Jacobs. With the publishing of this new work by Yellin, I feel empowered not only by Jacobs, but also by Yellin. These are two great achievements by two amazing women.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An inspiration!, April 14, 2004

By 

Glenn Darling (Sarasota, Fl United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Harriet Jacobs: A Life (Hardcover)

Above all else, there is a single conclusion to be drawn from this truly remarkable book.

Anyone who has a sincere interest in the history of the United States should feel slighted that Harriet Jacobs? story isn?t already entrenched in the American consciousness alongside Harriet Tubman?s or Sojourner Truth?s. In HARRIET JACOBS A LIFE, Jean Fagan Yellin unequivocally reinvigorates a truly unique and vital American perspective all but lost to us.

Here is the story of a woman born into slavery, fighting that condition with a resolve almost unprecedented in its selflessness. To save her children from the sexual torment she experienced as a girl, Jacobs hides in the crawl space over a store room for nearly six years, before finally escaping to the North.

And though the boldness of her resistance is indeed characterized by such large singular acts of heroism, it is also made palpable by her persistent and unrelenting immersion in the mechanics of 19th century social activism, a mechanism not altogether ready for the sort of sexual realism she would air. She speaks plainly of that which the 19th century woman traditionally did not, and in doing so galvanizes a population by the raw horror of her experience as a chattel slave.

Yellin?s biography not only places Jacobs? life in its proper historical, cultural, and political context, it does so with rich descriptions of the world she inhabited; the smell of the Edenton docks, the lecture halls and drawing rooms of Boston?s abolitionist movement, the grim specter of war torn Savannah, and the wizened frames of Freedmen refugees in the nation?s capital.

This is what makes the book so compelling, the utter pervasiveness of Yellin?s research, fleshed out in masterful prose. And she is not content merely to paint the broad technicolor picture, but also to reduce the story of Jacobs? daily life to its very nuts and bolts, the struggle to keep food on the table, to keep herself and her family at the imparting end of charity. Here is a woman who in one hour effects the core of the anti-slavery movement while in the very next toils as a nursemaid, cook, or seamstress.

The expression of that seeming dichotomy is the miracle of this book. And gives the modern reader precious little room to make any excuse for not standing up. Yellin?s book is an unforgettable biography of a remarkable woman, as well as an invaluable point of inspiration in troubling times.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An extremely compelling biography, April 18, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: Harriet Jacobs: A Life (Hardcover)

If you have ever read Harriet Jacobs's narrative, "Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl", you will be gasping to know more about the lives of this extraordinary woman, her two children and the other players in the plot of her young life.

Given the information available, Jean Fagan Yellin serves it up for us brilliantly thanks to her many and well presented, often extremely detailed accounts of Jacobs's movements after escape from North Carolina.

It is clear from summation of events in Jacobs's life that not only was she an intensely loving, protective and self-sacrificing mother, and seemingly held in good regard by all she came into contact with, she was also an extremely dedicated and active ambassador to the poor, the weak, and the defenseless, travelling all over the country and abroad for this singular cause, remaining to her death a champion of her people.

One of the great things about this book is that in detailing Jacobs's life, we get a better glimpse into the lives of the people important in her own life - her grandmother Molly Horniblow, her brother John S., her son Joseph and daughter Louisa, her half brother Elijah, the Norcoms and, perhaps to a slightly lesser extent, Sam Sawyer. By documenting aspects of the lives of those in Jacobs's immediate affairs, we are able to form a clearer understanding of her character, values, motives and relationships with others.

Yellin's biography is a fascinating historical tome in its own right, capturing the political atmosphere and mood of Civil and post Civil War America. Yellin does a grand job documenting key events, attitudes and individuals to shape the pre war Abolishionist movement, post war reconstruction and emerging institutions, and the Suffragist movement for women and freed African Americans.