When Jacobs was six years old, her mother died, and she was sent to the home of her mother's mistress, Margaret Horniblow. Her parents were both slaves, but her grandmother had been emancipated and owned her own home, earning a living as a baker. Jacobs was born a slave in North Carolina around 1813. Feminist scholars have also explored Jacobs's notions of selfhood and womanhood, her treatment of the female body, and the impact of her work on the genre of the slave narrative. A great deal of modern criticism has focused on Jacobs's exploitation of the sentimental domestic genre and on the differences between Jacobs's work and slave narratives such as Frederick Douglass's Narrative of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. The letters, along with the rest of Yellin's research, assured the authenticity of Jacobs's narrative and since then Incidents has received critical attention. In 1981, however, Jean Fagan Yellin discovered Jacobs's correspondence with Child, and with another abolitionist friend, Amy Post. Doubts about the narrative's veracity and its true author persisted into the twentieth century, and Incidents was consequently neglected by historians and critics alike. Many believed the book to have been written by its white abolitionist editor, Lydia Maria Child.

Soon after the publication of Incidents, which Jacobs penned under the pseudonym of Linda Brent, questions arose regarding the text's authenticity.

Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written By Herself (1861), stands out from the male-dominated slave narrative genre in its unique point of view and especially in its focus on the sexual exploitation of the female slave.

Frederick douglass and harriet jacobs