1859 Amy Post’s comments, so dated, appear as an appendix to Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), by ‘Linda Brent’. In it, Post writes that ‘Brent’ had lived in her house, during which time ‘her deportment indicated remarkable delicacy of feeling and purity of thought’, even though the life events she had to relate were horrific. Though ‘she passed through a baptism of suffering, even in recounting her trials to me’, Post urged her to write about her life, and publish the result.
‘Linda Brent’ was really Harriet Jacobs, and her story – of repeated sexual harassment by her master, her liaison with another white man, her hiding for seven years above her grandmother’s store-room, and her eventual flight to the North – is the fullest and frankest of all the women’s slave narratives. Her styles range from that of the sentimental novel, to the camera obscura effect of her outlook from her hiding place, to cool irony out of Dickens via Uncle Tom’s Cabin (see 20 March):
Mrs Flint [her mistress] … was totally deficient in energy. She had not strength to superintend her household affairs, but her nerves were so strong, that she could sit in her easy chair and see a woman whipped till the blood trickled from every stroke of the lash.
These literary powers made the book’s provenance suspect. How could an unlettered slave write like this? Had it been ghost-written by abolitionists? Or maybe it was an anonymous novel written to mimic a slave story? It wasn’t until 1981 that Jean Fagan Yellin, Jacobs’ biographer with access to all her papers, proved by acute literary detective work that Incidents was indeed the work of Harriet Jacobs.