Harrietjacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) has been dismissed, and resuscitated, precisely on the basis of its value as “truth,” even though it is widely accepted today that “the ‘unreliability’ of autobiography is an inescapable condition, not a rhetorical option.” Although there are explicit markers of the distance between “truth” and its representation in the text, contemporary critics overwhelmingly accept the transparency between the life of Harriet Jacobs and her narrative self-construct “Linda Brent.” Jean Fagan Yellin, perhaps Jacobs's most important critic, maintains that “you can trust her. She's not ever wrong. She may be wrong on incidentals like the birth order of her mistress's children – after all she was a woman in her forties trying to remember what happened to her as a teenager – but she's never wrong in substance.” The coordinates (right/“wrong,” “substance”/ incidentals, “trust” [worthy] / liar) are inscribed in Incidents's reception, even though the maxim Sidonie Smith articulates is accepted when contemporary critics deal with autobiography generally. Indeed, today, as we are more and more engrossed in the politics of aesthetics and representation, “truthfulness,” as Smith affirms, “becomes a much more complex and problematic phenomenon” that does not emphasize “the truth … in its factual or moral dimensions.”