Desiree Taylor, "The Life and Saga of Harriet Jacobs"

Boston Athenæum

October 29, 2019 at the Boston Athenæum. Harriet Jacobs lived in the United States at a time fraught with political unrest. She was born into slavery in 1813 and spent her life striving to make a fulfilling life for herself and her family in a country that defined her as less than. To history she left a scandalous autobiography chronicling her life as a fugitive slave, and through it exposed the ugly reality of life for female slaves. However, in the twentieth century, scholars considered Jacobs’s story to be a work of fiction written by a white female abolitionist in the service of the abolitionist cause. At the end of the twentieth century a feminist scholar laid to rest any doubt that Jacobs existed and was in fact the author of her autobiography. Join researcher and storyteller Desiree Taylor for a presentation of the life and the saga of Harriet Jacobs.