The ten stories gathered here show Rebecca Harding Davis to be an acute observer of the conflicts and ambiguities of a divided nation and position her as a major transitional writer between romanticism and realism. Instead of focusing on major Civil War conflicts and leaders, she takes readers into the intimate battles fought on family farms and backwoods roads.
Before Women Had Rights, They Worked - Regardless. Life in the Iron Mills is a short story (or novella) written by Rebecca Harding Davis in 1861, set in the factory world of the nineteenth century. It is one of the earliest American realist works, and is an important text for those who study labor and women's issues. It was immediately recognized as an innovative work, and introduced American readers to ""the bleak lives of industrial workers in the mills and factories of the nation."" Reviews: Life in the Iron Mills was initially published in The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 0007, Issue 42 in April 1861. After being published anonymously, both Emily Dickinson and Nathaniel Hawthorne praised the work. Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward was also greatly influenced by Davis's Life in the Iron Mills and in 1868 published in The Atlantic Monthly""The Tenth of January,"" based on the 1860 fire at the Pemberton Mills in Lawrence, Massachusetts. Get Your Copy Now.
Representing four prominent American women writers who flourished in the period following the Civil War, this collection includes "Life in the Iron Mills" by Rebecca Harding Davis, "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, "The Country of the Pointed Firs" by Sarah Orne Jewett, and "Souls Belated" by Edith Wharton. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
"Rebecca Harding Davis is best known for her gritty short story "Life in the Iron-Mills," set in her native Wheeling, West Virginia. Far less is known of her later career among elite social circles in Philadelphia, New York, and Europe, or her relationships with American presidents and leading international figures in the worlds of literature and the stage. In the first book-length biography of Davis, Sharon M. Harris traces the extraordinary life of this pioneering realist and recovers her status as one of America's notable women journalists. Harris also examines Rebecca's role as the leading member of the Davis family, a unique and nationally recognized family of writers that shaped the changing culture of later nineteenth-century literature and journalism. This accessible treatment of Davis's life, based on deep research in archival sources, provides new perspective on topics ranging from sectional tensions in the border South to the gendered world of nineteenth-century publishing. It promises to be the authoritative treatment of an important figure in the literary history of West Virginia and the wider world"
A scathing critique of the legal status of women and their property rights in nineteenth-century America, Rebecca Harding Davis’s 1878 novel A Law Unto Herself chronicles the experiences of Jane Swendon, a seemingly naïve and conventional nineteenth-century protagonist struggling to care for her elderly father with limited financial resources. In order to continue care, Jane seeks to secure her rightful inheritance despite the efforts of her cousin and later her husband, a greedy man who has tricked her father into securing her hand in marriage. Appealing to middle-class literary tastes of the age, A Law Unto Herself elucidated for a broad general audience the need for legal reforms regarding divorce, mental illness, inheritance, and reforms to the Married Women’s Property Laws. Through three fascinating female characters, the novel also invites readers to consider evolving gender roles during a time of cultural change.
This volume explores the lives and works of nine Northern women who wrote during the Civil War period, examining the ways in which, through their writing, they engaged in the national debates of the time. Lyde Sizer shows that from the 1850 publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin through Reconstruction, these women, as well as a larger mosaic of lesser-known writers, used their mainstream writings publicly to make sense of war, womanhood, Union, slavery, republicanism, heroism, and death. Among the authors discussed are Lydia Maria Child, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Sara Willis Parton (Fanny Fern), Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth, Mary Abigail Dodge (Gail Hamilton), Louisa May Alcott, Rebecca Harding Davis, and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps. Although direct political or partisan power was denied to women, these writers actively participated in discussions of national issues through their sentimental novels, short stories, essays, poetry, and letters to the editor. Sizer pays close attention to how these mostly middle-class women attempted to create a "rhetoric of unity," giving common purpose to women despite differences in class, race, and politics. This theme of unity was ultimately deployed to establish a white middle-class standard of womanhood, meant to exclude as well as include.
Vanishing Moments analyzes how various American authors have reified class through their writing, from the first influx of industrialism in the 1850s to the end of the Great Depression in the early 1940s. Eric Schocket uses this history to document America’s long engagement with the problem of class stratification and demonstrates how deeply America’s desire to deny the presence of class has marked even its most labor-conscious cultural texts. Schocket offers careful readings of works by Herman Melville, Rebecca Harding Davis, William Dean Howells, Jack London, T. S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, Muriel Rukeyser, and Langston Hughes, among others, and explores how these authors worked to try to heal the rift between the classes. He considers the challenges writers faced before the Civil War in developing a language of class amidst the predominant concerns about race and slavery; how early literary realists dealt with the threat of class insurrection; how writers at the turn of the century attempted to span the divide between the classes by going undercover as workers; how early modernists used working-class characters and idioms to shape their aesthetic experiments; and how leftists in the 1930s struggled to develop an adequate model to connect class and literature. Vanishing Moments’ unique combination of a broad historical scope and in-depth readings makes it an essential book for scholars and students of American literature and culture, as well as for political scientists, economists, and humanists. Eric Schocket is Associate Professor of American Literature at Hampshire College. “An important book containing many brilliant arguments—hard-hitting and original. Schocket demonstrates a sophisticated acquaintance with issues within the working-class studies movement.” --Barbara Foley, Rutgers University
Rebecca Harding Davis was a prolific writer who published chiefly in popular periodicals over the latter half of the nineteenth century. In tales that combine realism with sentimentalism and in topical essays, Davis confronted a wide range of current issues—notably women’s problems—as one who knew the frustration caused by the genteel female’s helpless social position and barriers against women entering the working world. In an excellent critical introduction, Jean Pfaelzer integrates cultural, historical, and psychological approaches in penetrating readings of Davis’s work. She emphasizes how Davis’s fictional embrace of the commonplace was instrumental in the demise of American romanticism and in eroding the repressive cultural expectations for women. In both fiction and nonfiction, Davis attacked contemporary questions such as slavery, prostitution, divorce, the Spanish-American War, the colonization of Africa, the plight of the rural South, northern racism, environmental pollution, and degraded work conditions generated by the rise of heavy industry. Written from the standpoint of a critical observer in the midst of things, Davis’s work vividly recreates the social and ideological ferment of the post-Civil War United States. The American literary canon is enriched by this collection, nearly all of which is reprinted for the first time.
An analysis of the beginnings of American imperial rhetoric; This is a study of the early writings of Richard Harding Davis, the premier American journalist of the 1890s, best remembered for his coverage of the Spanish-American War. The emphasis of the book is on Davis's reporting - including several volumes of travel writing, covering trips to the Near East and South and Central America. Some account is also made of his fiction, most especially Soldiers of Fortune (1897), which critics have seen as a romantic treatment of the imperialist elan. As such, the novel serves as a prolegomenon to the war in Cuba, which Davis covered during its insurrectionist stage. He later accompanied Theodore Roosevelt's Rough Riders when U.S. forces invaded the island in 1898, an action he had urged and may have in part inspired. John Seelye argues that Davis, rather than supporting the notion of an American empire on the Roman or British plan, advocated what would become U.S. strategy over the next century: a limited engagement in support of embryonic democratic movements in the Caribbean, followed by withdrawal of armed forces once a stable government had been established. While approving British m
