[Jacobs, Harriet Ann]. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Written by Herself. Edited by Lydia Maria Child. 306 pages. 8vo, later (modern) black morocco-backed early marbled boards with new endpapers; scattered fox-ing throughout. Boston:

[Jacobs, Harriet Ann]. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Written by Herself. Edited by Lydia Maria Child. 306 pages. 8vo, later (modern) black morocco-backed early marbled boards with new endpapers; scattered fox-ing throughout. Boston: Published for the Author, 1861 E1,000/1,500 FIRST EDITION. Long regarded as fiction, and even attributed to Lydia Maria Child, recent evidence proves this was written by an ex-slave. Letters acquired by University of Rochester enabled historian Jean Fagan Yellin to verify that "Perhaps the most comprehensive slave narrative by an African-American woman," was written by Harriet Ann Jacobs (1813-97). William Cooper Nell, reviewing the book in the Liberator, 25 January 1861, said: "It presents features more attractive than many of its predecessors purporting to be histories of slave life in America, because in contrast with their mingling of fiction with fact, this record of compli-cated experience needs not the charms that any pen of fiction, however gifted and graceful could lend. They shine by the lustre of their own truthfulnesss Harriet Jacobs later established a school for black refugees. LCP, Negro History, #191 (in which Edwin Woolf dismissed the work as "a piece of anti-slavery pro-paganda"). Blockson Collection 9554; Work, page 312 (with asterisk, ascribing it to a Negro writer). [SEE ILLUSTRATION]