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Jacobs was born a slave in Edenton, North Carolina. Though
she led a happy childhood, living with both her mother and
her father, she was sold to Doctor and Mrs. James Norcom in
1825. The doctor sexually assaulted her and his wife abused
her; in defense Jacobs began an affair with a white lawyer,
with whom she had two children. In 1835 she managed to escape
from Norcom's country plantation and hid for seven years in
the house of her maternal grandmother, a free woman. Jacobs
escaped to the North in 1842 and was emancipated by her employer,
Cornelia Willis, in 1853. After working in Rochester, New
York, in the Anti-Slavery Office run by her brother, Jacobs
realized that her story would be a powerful contribution to
the antislavery literature circulated by abolitionists. She
wanted to share the painful reality of her life with the women
of the North, hoping to convince them that slavery denied
black women the chance to devote their lives to their children
and families. With the help of Lydia Maria Child, a well-known
writer and abolitionist, Jacobs published Incidents in
the Life of a Slave Girl in 1861 under the pseudonym
Linda Brent.
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