What's in a Name
Thoughts on the Title of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
This installment of Dispatches from the Rare Book Trade is sponsored by Downtown Brown Books List 130, which includes newly cataloged books from the Tom Garner collection, with signed first editions by Ken Kesey, Larry McMurtry, and Harry Crews.
Have We Forgotten the True Title of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl?
“You can learn a lot by looking at a book.”
This pithy advice came to me from a fellow bookseller. Most of us—collectors and dealers—are far too quick to see a book and immediately turn to a screen for more information. We forget to consider what the book itself can tell us while we are busy checking points of issue and prices. Often, a book will reveal itself, if you remember to look. This is one such story.
In March, my friend Rachel Phillips at Burnside Rare Books showed me a new acquisition, a remarkable copy of one of the great nineteenth-century books, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs. Rachel’s copy originally came from the Jacobs family, and it had a long letter with a previously unknown description of the author’s funeral laid in. In fact, that letter may be the only surviving account of the event. Take a look: it’s an amazing copy of an amazing book.1
I probably should have been focused on the letter or the provenance, but I kept staring at the spine. Stamped at the top was a single word—“LINDA”—that didn’t seem to fit.
Lately I’ve been immersed in all kinds of book crime—the Oregonian newspaper just published an update on the ongoing James Strand theft saga and I recently examined a number of books with faked bindings and title pages—so I was primed to disbelieve everything. Rachel assured me that Burnside Rare Books had sold another copy, rebacked with the original spine cloth preserved, which also had the mysterious word “Linda” on the spine. Still, I wanted to know more, and I am surprised by what I found.
Jacobs’s groundbreaking account of the sexual exploitation faced by enslaved women had a hard time finding its way into print. First, Jacobs went to England searching for a publisher. Anti-slavery books were popular in London and the British viewed Jacobs as an important abolitionist while in America she was seen as just a former slave working as a domestic servant.2 Nothing came of her trip.
An American publisher offered to print her memoir if she could convince the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe, to write an introduction. Stowe said no. The Boston publisher Thayer and Eldridge agreed to bring it out but they went bankrupt before the book was printed. Fortunately, they had already made stereotype plates, the most expensive part of the printing process. Jacobs acquired them, which enabled her to self-publish the book in early 1861, just as the Civil War broke out.
Jacobs used the pseudonym Linda Brent to give herself more freedom to write frankly about slavery and women.
“I have placed myself before you to be judged as a woman,” she wrote to a friend with whom she had shared the manuscript. “It is to come to you just as I am, a poor slave mother. Not to tell you what I have heard but what I have seen and what I have suffered. And if there is any sympathy to give—let it be given to the thousands of Slave Mothers that are still in bondage—suffering far more than I have.”3
Perhaps because the book was self-published by a woman of very limited means, the binding is fragile and the sewing is weak. Most copies you’ll see are rebound. Burnside Rare Books’s copy is in its original, unrestored drab cloth. The lack of adornment speaks to its humble, earnest, and even radical contents.
When people have considered the question at all, the general assumption is that the word “Linda” on the spine refers to Jacobs’s pseudonym. That’s not an unreasonable assumption. Self-published authors often defy the normal conventions of books. When I had a shop that sold new books, self-published authors offered me books all the time with blank spines. Even just a first name would be better than nothing. When I pointed out to these fledgling authors that no one could tell what the book was when it was shelved normally, they always acted surprised, as if they had never noticed that books have titles printed on their spines.
“LINDA” continued to bug me. I drove to a neighboring town to buy a copy of Jacobs’s biography, which didn’t mention the subject at all. I read scholarly articles. Finally, I broke down and ordered a two-volume university press book, The Harriet Jacobs Family Papers, which reprints virtually every letter, diary entry, and newspaper article about Harriet Jacobs from the nineteenth century.
I think I found the answer to my nagging question about the word on the spine.
We’ve been calling the book by the wrong name.
It was hiding in plain sight. While “Linda” does not appear in the index to the Jacobs family papers, the word shows up a dozen times in the two volumes.
On January 21, 1861, Jacobs’s friend William Nell wrote to the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison telling him about “a book just issued from the press, entitled, Linda: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, seven years concealed in slavery.”
Two weeks later, Nell began advertising the book the same way in the Boston Liberator.
Nell seems to have taken the initiative to extend the title with a reference to the time Jacobs spent hiding in a crawlspace after she fled her enslaver. That suggests that “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl” might have been intended as a description of the contents.
Nell is not the only person who called Jacobs’s memoir “Linda.”
On February 11, 1861, a columnist in the National Anti-Slavery Standard asked his readers, “Have you read Linda”?
In March, Lydia Maria Child, who helped Jacobs revise the book and wrote the introduction, inquired after booksellers in New Bedford who might want copies. Child wrote, “I have edited a book for a highly intelligent and worthy colored woman, which you may have seen advertised under the name of Linda.”
Later that month, the Weekly Anglo-African published an excerpt described as being “from a volume lately published, Linda Brent.”
In April, John Greenleaf Whittier wrote to Child, “A thousand thanks for giving us that wonderful book Linda.“
After Jacobs died, in 1897, the Women’s Journal ran an obituary that concluded, “Harriet’s book, called Linda, which gives the record of her early life, written about the year 1858, and published in 1861, is now out of the market.4 It should be carefully preserved in our libraries, for it is a wonderful record of the suffering and heroism of those never to be forgotten days.”
And an obituary in the Women’s Tribune suggested that “many older readers will probably remember the thrilling story of the slave girl under the title of Linda.”
A few contemporary reviews used the title Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, which, to be fair, is what appears on the title page.
But in the nineteenth century, the book seems to have been more commonly known as Linda, in both public and private circles.5
The literary critic Anthony Appiah, in his introduction to a modern edition of the book, notes that Jacobs’s work occupies a unique literary position, drawing “not only on the traditions of the slave narrative genre but also on the—then still largely white—traditions of the sentimental novel.”6
Seen in that light, calling the book Linda feels less like an anomaly and more like a deliberate nod to literary convention. Many nineteenth-century books were named for their heroines: Emma by Jane Austen, Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë, Mary Barton and Ruth by Elizabeth Gaskell, Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens. Even the first American edition of Pride and Prejudice appeared under the title Elizabeth Bennet.7
Over time, as copies of Jacobs’s autobiography were rebound and they were recorded in library catalogs based on the title page, the arguably correct title of the book, Linda: Incidents in the Life of Slave Girl, has been lost to history.
I considered the possibility that Linda was one of those books that people give colloquial names to, like Alice in Wonderland, the Wizard of Oz, or even the Bible.8 But there’s the inconvenient fact of the word “Linda” on the spine where the title usually goes—in the place where it will be seen most often, when the book is on a shelf or laying on a table.
I’ll give the last word on the subject to the author. In her surviving letters and papers, Jacobs mentioned her book by name only once, on the sole surviving sales receipt, written out by Jacobs for “the purchase of cop[ie]s of Linda.”
You can learn a lot by looking at a book.
—Scott Brown, Downtown Brown Books
Jean Fagan Yellen. Harriet Jacobs: A Life, p. 138.
Harriet Jacobs to Amy Kirby Post, 21 June 1857. Quoted in The Harriet Jacobs Family Papers, pp. 236–237.
“Out of the market” means out of print. Robert Althorp Boit, who knew Jacobs, wrote in his diary on March 14, 1897, “The book is very difficult to find now-a-days. Edith Grinnell has a copy…[and] Wm Lloyd Garrison—a partner of Houghton Mifflin &c—told me he had several.”
After publishing the book in the US, Jacobs took the stereotype plates to England, where the book was retitled, Deeper Wrong; Or, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.
Appiah, Anthony. “Introduction” in Early African-American Classics (Bantam, 1990). p. xv.
Coincidentally, Rebecca Romney, who I wrote about previously, posted a video about Elizabeth Bennet recently. However, I owe the idea to Belt Publishing founder Anne Trubek, who reminded me of this example in an entirely unrelated email chain.
The titles on the title pages of these books are Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and for the King James version, The Holy Bible, Conteyning the Old Testament and the New, Newly Translated Out of the Originall Tongues.
983188 fascinating read and what went into an important book