On a spring afternoon in Sarasota, Fla., the weather was nearly perfect save for a mild breeze that caused Jean Fagan Yellin to cough every so often. “When the wind comes a certain way, it’ll choke you,” she said from her perch on the deck of her Florida home. A professor emerita at Pace University, Mrs. Yellin, 74, divides her time between New York and Florida with her husband, Ed Yellin, a professor emeritus at Einstein College of Medicine. “We got old and decided we didn’t want those northern winters anymore,” she explained.

It’s fitting that Mrs. Yellin migrates between the North and the South, because she’s best known as the scholar who authenticated the only female slave narrative in American history. “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl” was originally published in 1861 by an author using the name Linda Brent. It recounts the life of a North Carolina slave who, after years of being physically and sexually abused by her owner, hid in an attic for seven years before finally escaping North. Opponents of the text labeled it abolitionist fiction, arguing, among other claims, that it was too well written to have been penned by a slave.

In 1981, Mrs. Yellin started the process of proving the detractors wrong. She discovered a clutch of letters in the University of Rochester archives written by a runaway slave named Harriet Jacobs to abolitionist Amy Post. In the letters, Jacobs explained that she was the author of “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl” but had used an alias in order to go undetected by her former owner. Mrs. Yellin’s battle had only begun. “I demonstrated that the book was black authored, but that still didn’t answer the question of whether it was fiction or nonfiction,” she said. “That took six more years of documenting Jacobs’s life. But when I published the Harvard edition in 1987, which is more fully annotated than any other slave narrative, everyone was convinced.”

Mrs. Yellin’s parents blessed her with a vigorous curiosity. She was born and raised in East Lansing, Mich., at the time a predominantly white, Protestant town. Her own family didn’t fit that bill. Her father was Irish Catholic and her mother was Jewish, and neither shared the political perspective of the surrounding majority. “I come from a proud tradition of American radicalism,” Mrs. Yellin said. “My mother was one of the first generations of women to vote, and my father ran a labor paper during the Depression, before unions were legal. I was taught to question everything.”

That commitment to activism followed her to several colleges throughout the “Middle West,” as she calls it. She dropped out of multiple schools during the 1940s, including the University of Michigan, where she met her husband. “Ed and I dropped out of Michigan together,” she said. “We were not very academic. We were political.” In 1951, she finally earned a B.A. from Roosevelt University in Chicago, just as she was about to give birth to her first child. “I took my last exam and then went to the delivery room,” she said. She had two more children while Ed studied medicine. Then she enrolled at the University of Illinois to work on a Ph.D. in literature.

Her dissertation – which was published in 1972 as “The Intricate Knot: Black Figures in American Literature, 1776-1863”- landed her at the Schomburg Center in New York. “When I started this work in the 1960s, there was an intellectual apartheid,” she said. “Black scholars had been doing it all along, and they’d developed their own organizations because they’d been Jim Crow-ed out of mainstream academia. Students like me, who were not of color, were completely unaware of their whole discourse. If I hadn’t had access to the Schomburg, I wouldn’t have been able to do anything. The University of Illinois has a major library, but like most universities, it had very few resources in African-American anything.”

Since her early research days, she has written three books and edited four more. Her Jacobs biography, “Harriet Jacobs: A Life” (Basic Books), was published last year and won the Frederick Douglass Prize given to the year’s best nonfiction book on slavery. And while Mrs. Yellin jokes that she’s stuck in the 19th century, she’s very serious when she points out that Americans are in denial about slavery – one of the primary reasons she believes the Jacobs text went unresearched for more than 100 years. “African-American letters were being left in limbo,” she said. “They’d been maligned by so-called serious scholars for generations because they hadn’t been authenticated. The word was it couldn’t be done. But I said if this was Nathaniel Hawthorne I’d go check this and that, and that’s what I did because I wanted to show it could be done.”

Mrs. Yellin is adamantly committed to these issues, and yet she’s the first to point out that black culture is not her specialty. “I’m not an African-Americanist scholar and I don’t pretend to be,” she said. “For the most part, black academics have received my work with great generosity because I’ve always tried to be clear about my identity so people would know where I was coming from. My perspective is an effort at critique of the status quo, and I want the scholarship to stand up so we can argue about interpretation and not authenticity.”

The main detractor of her early work was John Blassingame, a black historian from Yale who pioneered the study of slavery. He insisted for years that “Incidents” was fiction. He changed his tune after a thorough re-examination of Mrs. Yellin’s research, and wrote a blurb in the 1987 edition endorsing her findings.

In the insular world of academia, researching black history has always been a challenge, but the Blassingame critique also highlighted the academic prejudice against the study of the condition of women. “Incidents” does more than point out the injustices of slavery – it also deals with the oppression of women, especially those of color, and therefore is a profound work of early American feminism. “Jean’s devotion to the life and work of Harriet Jacobs has inspired a generation of scholars seeking to document the history of black women in the Americas,” the director of Columbia’s Institute for Research in African-American Studies, Farah Griffin, said. “Her model of recovery and analysis of ‘Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl’ gave birth to an intellectual project that marries the insights of African-American studies and feminist analysis in order to better understand an important and often undocumented history.”

It’s a delicate balancing act. “I’m not diminishing the role of black men, but the mistreatment of black women has remained unexamined for hundreds of years,” Mrs. Yellin said. “This is a problem at the heart of our nation, and it remains that way because people don’t want to know about it. A century after Jacobs, Strom Thurmond’s daughter is just now getting a chance to tell her story. I see the need for major change in relation to these questions in our country.”

Mrs. Yellin has been well rewarded for work. She’s been lauded by everyone from Henry Louis Gates Jr. to Pulitzer Prize-winning author Joan Hedrick, and she’s been awarded research grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Ford Foundation, among others. She is most thankful for the support of black feminists. “No one in academia works harder than they do,” she said. “I spent years saying, ‘I’m not the person to write the Jacobs biography,’ and black feminists just said, ‘Jean, be quiet. You know more about her than anyone, so write it down.’ Without that encouragement I never would have been able to do it.”

And so Mrs. Yellin’s research continues. She’s slated to hand in a manuscript of Jacobs’s letters to the University of North Carolina Press by the end of the year. It will be a two-volume addition marking the first publication of papers of a black woman held in slavery – and it’s annotated to the gills. Once that’s completed, she’s going to take a much-needed break from her detective work and spend a little more time working on her pottery. “At one point a friend told me, ‘Jean you’ve spent 20 years of your life on a woman who only wrote one book,'” she said. “But my answer was, ‘It’s a really good book.'”