Linda Brent (1818 - 1896)

Linda Brent was one of the very few women who wrote about the experiences of slaves. She wrote, "Slavery is terrible for men, but it was far more terrible for women" because women also had to fear and experience sexual abuse from their masters. According to Walter Teller in his introduction to Brent's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, she was a "mulatto, a great-granddaughter of a South Carolina Planter." She did not gain freedom until age twenty seven and faced the danger of being recaptured and enslaved once again even though she was living in a free state because of the enactment of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850. She used several aliases including Harriet Brent Jacobs.

In her autobiography Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, she describes her life as a slave and the horrific ordeal she went through to escape slavery. To escape anymore sexual exploitation from her master, she ran away and hid in her grandmother's attic, hoping to proceed to the north in the future.