Rebecca Harding Davis

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Standard Name: Davis, Rebecca Harding
Birth Name: Rebecca Blaine Harding
RHD published in the later nineteenth-century United States over 500 works, including novels, short fiction, sketches, and social commentary that turned away from romanticism and sentimental fiction to a distinctively American, proletarian realism.
Lasseter, Janice Milner, and Sharon M. Harris, editors. “Introduction”. Rebecca Harding Davis: Writing Cultural Autobiography, Vanderbilt University Press, pp. 1-19.
2, 9-10
She also developed an extensive career contributing articles and stories to the periodical press. In the context of the turmoil over early feminism and the Civil War, and with the insight gained from her own struggles as a writing woman, she created stories about contemporary social issues that earned her the label, from Henry James , of the poet of poor people.
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford.
Howard, June. “What Is Sentimentality?”. American Literary History, Vol.
spring, 11
, No. 1, pp. 63-81.
74
Owing to the extent of her ouevre, only a part of it is discussed here.
Black-and-white, head-and-shoulders photograph of Rebecca Harding Davis. She faces forward, her dark hair parted severely straight down the middle and curling on her shoulders.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Textual Production Fanny Aikin Kortright
American Rebecca Harding Davis published a novel with the same title five years later, which later again caused Kortright's anti-suffrage panmphlet Pro Aris et Focis to be, embarrassingly, ascribed to Davis.
Textual Production Fanny Aikin Kortright
This book sprang from her conviction that the campaign for women's suffrage was damaging their status by compromising their real dignity.
Kortright, Fanny Aikin. The Recollections of My Long Life. Printed for the author by Farmer and Sons.
Once the book was printed she sent it out to leading politicians and...
Textual Production Tillie Olsen
By the time she entered high school she was keeping a journal in assorted and undated notebooks containing poems, bits of stories, drafts of letters, and reflections.
Reid, Panthea. Tillie Olsen: One Woman, Many Riddles. Rutgers University Press.
37
One year into high school she began...
Textual Production Tillie Olsen
At AmherstTO worked on a never-completed book about Rebecca Harding Davis . This fed into her edition of Life in the Iron Mills, 1972, with its lengthy afterword.
Reid, Panthea. Tillie Olsen: One Woman, Many Riddles. Rutgers University Press.
246
Textual Features Tillie Olsen
Olsen gave this book a double dedication. The first read: For our silenced people, century after century their beings consumed in the hard, everyday essential work of maintaining human life. Their art, which still they...
Literary responses Frances Mary Peard
Next year a Harper's reviewer of John Andross by Rebecca Harding Davis singled outThorpe Regis as preferable, in its ease and enjoyment of reading (suitable for consuming out-of-doors on a quiet summer day)...
Textual Features Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
Mid-twentieth-century scholars of economic, political, and realistic novels, including Walter F. Taylor in 1942 and Gordon Milne in 1966, considered ESP the first American novelist to deal with themes of urban industrial blight.
Kessler, Carol Farley. Elizabeth Stuart Phelps. Twayne.
50, 140n7

Timeline

9 November 1857: The first issue appeared of the US magazine...

Writing climate item

9 November 1857

The first issue appeared of the US magazineAtlantic Monthly. It set out to provide articles of an abstract and permanent value, while not ignoring the healthy appetite of the mind for entertainment in...

Texts

Davis, Rebecca Harding. “A Family History”. Rebecca Harding Davis: Writing Cultural Autobiography, edited by Janice Milner Lasseter and Sharon M. Harris, Vanderbilt University Press, 2001, pp. 137-48.
Davis, Rebecca Harding. A Law Unto Herself. J. B. Lippincott and Co., 1878.
Davis, Rebecca Harding. “Biographical Introduction”. Life in the Iron Mills; or, the Korl Woman, edited by Tillie Olsen, The Feminist Press, 1972.
Davis, Rebecca Harding. Bits of Gossip. Houghton, Mifflin, and Company, 1904.
Davis, Rebecca Harding. “Bits of Gossip”. Rebecca Harding Davis: Writing Cultural Autobiography, edited by Janice Milner Lasseter and Sharon M. Harris, Vanderbilt University Press, 2001, pp. 21-134.
Davis, Rebecca Harding. Dallas Galbraith. J. B. Lippincott and Co., 1868.
Davis, Rebecca Harding. Doctor Warrick’s Daughters. Harper, 1896.
Davis, Rebecca Harding. “Earthen Pitchers”. Scribner’s Monthly, Vol.
7-8
, pp. 73 - 81, 199.
Davis, Rebecca Harding. Frances Waldeaux. Harper, 1897.
Davis, Rebecca Harding. John Andross. Orange Judd, 1874.
Davis, Rebecca Harding. Kitty’s Choice: A Story of Berrytown. J. B. Lippincott, 1874.
Davis, Rebecca Harding. Life in the Iron Mills; or, The Korl Woman. Editor Olsen, Tillie, The Feminist Press, 1972.
Davis, Rebecca Harding. “Life in the Iron-Mills”. Atlantic Monthly, Vol.
7
, No. 42, pp. 430-51.
Davis, Rebecca Harding. Life in the Iron-Mills. Editor Tichi, Cecelia, Bedford Books, 1998.
Davis, Rebecca Harding. Margret Howth. Ticknor and Fields, 1862.
Davis, Rebecca Harding. Silhouettes of American Life. Scribner’s, 1892.
Davis, Rebecca Harding. “The Wife’s Story”. Atlantic Monthly, Vol.
14
, pp. 26-31.
Davis, Rebecca Harding. Waiting for the Verdict. Sheldon, 1868.