Critical Response
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl was not very popular when it first came out for many reasons, including the timing, at the start of the Civil War; after the war ended people were confused whether the book had been written by Harriet Beecher Stowe, Lydia Maria Child, or Harriet Jacobs. Since the book was written using a false identity, it was dismissed as being fiction. The historical opinion on the book until the 1980s was that it was fiction written by Lydia Maria Childs. The book really re-emerged during the 1970s and 1980s, when Jean Fagan Yellin began doing research into the book and author, and through the use of historical documents proved that Harriet Jacobs was the true author and that what she said in the book really did happen.
Harriet Jacobs's work is now received as a great slave narrative that helped people to understand slavery in a new way. Before the book came out there had never been a book that talked about the sexualization of women in slavery. In the book Jacobs says that women in slavery cannot be held to the same moral standards of white women or free women because slave women often do not have control.
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