Whose book is this?: Authorial versus editorial control of Harriet Brent Jacobs' Incidents in the life of a slave girl: Written by herself

Abstract

The recent surge of critical interest in autobiography, leads us to rethink all of our assumptions about this genre. In particular, Jeffery Melhman's and Germaine Bree's ideas on the significance of the act of writing to the autobiographer's gradual self-discovery, help us to understand the peculiar questions of authenticity surrounding the nineteenth century American collaborative slave narrative. Following a brief discussion of American abolitionists' rules governing the format and publication of American slave narratives, this article examines some of Harriet Brent Jacobs' letters to Amy Post in which she explains why and how she wrote her life story. It is then argued that the manner in which the abolitionist Lydia Maria Child edited the manuscript for publication produced a text in which two narrative voices are then discernible.