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The Harriet Jacobs Family Papers. Edited by Jean Fagan Yellin and others. (2 vols.; Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, c. 2008. Pp. lxxxii, 396; xl, 397-929. Boxed set and CD-ROM, $125.00, ISBN 978-0-80783131-1.)
In 1861, when Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself was published in Boston as the story of "Linda Brent," progressive readers knew that the author was the self-emancipated North Carolinian Harriet Jacobs. However, only Jacobs 's editor, the noted writer and abolitionist Lydia Maria Child, was named on the title page. As old-time abolitionist sentiment waned and Reconstruction was eclipsed, Jacobs and her narrative were forgotten. Incidents reemerged in the 1970s during the surge of mainstream scholarly patronage of black history. Yet academic opinion considered Linda's story a piece of fiction - abolitionist propaganda at best - written by Child. Then, in 1987, Jean Fagan Yellin published an edition of the narrative with Harvard University Press that proved Jacobs's authorship. Thanks to Yellin and the expanded edition of the narrative she published in 2000, Incidents has become a mainstay of courses in American literature and history. Yellin is also the author of the well-received biography Harriet Jacobs: A Life (New York, 2004).
For the two- volume The Harriet Jacobs Family Papers, Yellin, her coeditors, and a team of researchers have painstakingly compiled a massive assortment of documents. These include items by and about members of the Jacobs family, northern friends, and southern associates, as well as genealogical data. The documents are arranged in twelve chronological parts, each with an insightful introductory essay. Both volumes also contain identical sections of brief but useful biographies of key people and excellent cross-references, notes, and headnotes. This vast array of sources, including diaries, letters, convention reports, newspapers, bills of sale, and wills, offers significant insight into many facets of nineteenth-century Ufe. The identifying notes are especially impressive, and one notices very few errors (for example, "Seth Richards,"...