A haunting, evocative recounting of her life as a slave in North Carolina and of her final escape and emancipation, Harriet Jacobs’s classic narrative, written between 1853 and 1858 and published pseduonymously in 1861, tells firsthand of the horrors inflicted on slaves. In writing this extraordinary memoir, which culminates in the seven years she spent hiding in a crawl space in her grandmother’s attic, Jacobs skillfully used the literary genres of her time, presenting a thoroughly feminist narrative that portrays the evils and traumas of slavery, particularly for women and children.

Harriet Jacobs was born into slavery in North Carolina in 1813, became a mother at sixteen, a fugitive slave at twenty-two, and, in January 1861 at age forty-eight, author of the most comprehensive antebellum slave narrative.