Harriet Jacobs was an American author. In 1861, she published Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl under the pseudonym Linda Brent.

Jacobs was one of many escaped slaves who wrote autobiographical narratives in an effort to shape opinion in the Northern states concerning the "peculiar instiution" of slavery. She appealed mainly to middle-class white Christian women in the north, through her descriptions of slavery destroying the virtue of women through harassment and rape.

She criticised the religion of the South as being un-Christian, and as emphasizing the value of money ("If I am going to hell, bury my money with me," says a particularly brutal and uneducated slaveholder). She described another slaveholder with the sentence, "He boasted the name and standing of a Christian, though Satan never had a truer follower." Jacobs argued that these men were not exceptions to the general rule. The cruelty of slavery destroyed the virtue of an entire society, and "is a curse to the whites as well as to the blacks".

Much of "Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl" is devoted to the protagonist's struggle to free her two children (born out of wedlock through a consensual relationship with a white man who wasn't her master), after she runs away herself. She spends seven years trapped in a tiny space built into her grandmother's barn to occasionally see and hear the voices of her children.