Linda Brent

Biography

Linda Brent was the pseudonym of Harriet Jacobs (1813–1897), an African American writer whose autobiography Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is one of the most important slave narratives in American literature. Born into slavery in Edenton, North Carolina, Jacobs endured years of sexual harassment from her enslaver before escaping and hiding in a cramped attic space above her grandmother’s house for nearly seven years. She eventually reached the North, where she became active in the abolitionist movement and wrote her autobiography, published in 1861 under the pseudonym Linda Brent. The narrative was groundbreaking for its frank treatment of the sexual exploitation of enslaved women—a subject largely taboo in the era’s abolitionist literature. Long dismissed as fiction, the work was authenticated by historian Jean Fagan Yellin in the 1980s, restoring Jacobs to her rightful place as one of the most important voices in African American and women’s literature.