It was not Harriet Jacob's nature to give up without a fight. Born into slavery, Harriet Jacobs would thwart repeated sexual advancements made by her master for years, then run away to the North ...

Harriet Jacobs is one of the best-known female abolitionists and authors who wrote about their experiences of enslavement in the South. But while searching for information about Jacobs' children ...

Harriet Jacobs, John Jacobs’s sister, shown in 1894. Her 1861 autobiography, “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,” is now recognized as a cornerstone of 19th-century American literature.

Harriet Jacobs: A Life (Basic Civitas Books; 394 pages), by Jean Fagan Yellin, is the first biography of Jacobs, and it’s a harrowing case study of the cruel conundrums women faced under slavery.