Harriet A. Jacobs

Harriet Jacobs (1813–1897) was born into slavery in Edenton, North Carolina. Inherited by a child whose father, a physician, pursued her sexually for years, she bore two children to a white lawyer in the hope of protection, then in 1835 hid in a tiny crawl space in her grandmother's house for nearly seven years before escaping to New York. Encouraged by abolitionist friends, she wrote Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, published in 1861 under the name Linda Brent. During and after the Civil War she ran relief efforts and schools for freed people in Virginia and Georgia. Her authorship of the book was doubted until the 1980s.