Harriet Jacobs (1813-1897)

• an escaped slave who wrote an autobiographical narrative, Incidents in the Life of Slave Girl under the pseudonym Linda Brent in order to shape opinion in the Norther states concerning slavery
• she appealed to middle-class white Christian women in the north through her descriptions of slavery destroying the virtue of women through harassment and rape
• she criticized the religion of the South as being un-Christian and emphasizing only money
• she claims that the cruelty of slavery destroyed the virtue of an entire society and "is a curse to the whites as well as to the blacks."
• her novel is mostly devoted to her struggle to free her two children, born out of wedlock through a consensual relationship with a white man who wasn't her master, after she has run away
• she spends seven years trapped in a tiny space built into her grandmother's barn just so she could occasionally see and hear the voices of her children