Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is a genuine story of a woman's struggle for self-identity, self-preservation, and liberation. It is one of the few remaining slave narratives written by a woman. Harriet Jacobs (1813-1897)'s incredible adventure from enslavement and humiliation in North Carolina to freedom and reunion with her children in the North is chronicled in this autobiographical account.
The memoir, written and published in 1861 after Jacobs' tragic escape from a nasty and predatory master, is a striking and unabashed picture of the master-slave relationship's abuses and hypocrisy.