The Harriet Jacobs Family Papers, edited by Jean Fagan Yellin and published by UNC Press in 2008, is a two‑volume annotated collection offering nearly 300 primary source documents from over 900 discovered items relating to Harriet Jacobs, her activist brother John S. Jacobs, and her daughter Louisa Matilda Jacobs.
The collection includes letters, diaries, and other writings that provide rich context beyond Jacobs’s pseudonymous autobiography Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. It provides a fuller view of her lifelong struggle against slavery, racism, and sexism. A CD‑ROM accompanies the edition with a searchable version of the entire text.
Yellin’s decades of research disproved earlier skepticism about the authenticity of Jacobs’s narrative, showing it to be deeply autobiographical. Her editorial work preserves hundreds of original letters and documents, making this project a foundational reference for scholars of abolition, 19th‑century women’s history, and African‑American studies.
