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By Jean Fagan Yellin. New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2004. 394 pp. $27.50
In 1987, Harvard University Press published Jean Fagan Yellin's breakthrough edition of Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself, a powerful slave narrative, first published in 1861, that exposed the sexual exploitation of slave girls and women at the heart of the institution of slavery. Before Yellin's edition, most scholars agreed that the narrative's pseudonymous author, "Linda Brent," was its white, abolitionist editor, Lydia Maria Child. Sixteen years later, Yellin has carried her project of recovering Harriet Jacobs to wonderful fruition with the publication of the first full-length biography of the woman who wrote, "by herself," what Yellin calls "a work of American genius" (xxi).
Yellin follows the incidents of Jacobs's life as told in her autobiography, but goes beyond that text with details and context, enriching the well-known story. Jacobs was born in 1813, in Edenton, North Carolina, into an extended African American family that straddled slavery and freedom. The family matriarch, Harriet's maternal grandmother, Molly Horniblow, was a freedwoman and homeowner who ran her own baking business to save money to buy her children; her father was a proud, skilled carpenter who worked for hire; and her mother, who died when Jacobs was six, was remembered as "noble and womanly" (Incidents 5). It was Jacobs's first mistress who taught...