Rebecca Harding Davis
(1831-1910)

In her many articles for Atlantic Monthly, for Appletons, Harper's New Monthly Magazine, The Century, Lippencott's and Scribner's, and other journals and magazines, she sought to expose inequities through the real and the commonplace. Her fiction often characterized as radical by her readers, moved from addressing the abuse of workers by industrial capitalists, to prostitution, to slavery. In her desire to expose life's inequities she pulled from incidences of  "accurate history" ... closely observed human interactions and non-glorified depictions of daily life sometimes startling in their brutal opinion. She was not necessarily a sympathetic observer. She frequently pointed out life and geography that was "peculiar" and exotic to her and by doing so, distanced herself from the experience and revealed her romantic heritage. 

She often traveled to western North Carolina and her serialized article about the region, "By-Paths in the Mountains," for Atlantic Monthly, vol. 61, issues, 363-364, weaves travelogue literature with careful observations of human character. One of her characters sums up the typical picturesque travel article that was the fashion of the day: "The history of all summering places is alike. An adventurous artist usually ventures into a new field and whispers his discovery to his friends. Scenery is well-nigh as popular a hobby just now as household decoration. ..."  Many women authors between 1850 and the 1890's wrote articles similar to Davis'.  They were intended to appeal to the average reader and therefore,  often reflected common cultural values held at the time. The work of these authors is sometimes referred to as "local color" literature, a kind of bridge between the romanticism of the earlier century with the growing realism of the later century. Harding fits this hybrid model well. Her article, "Life in the iron mills : and other stories," published in Atlantic Monthly in 1861,  is a classic and empathetic study of industrialization and its affects on families and community.

 " IT always has seemed to me that each human being, before going out into the silence, should leave behind him, not the story of his own life, but of the time in which he lived, - as he saw it, - its creed, its purpose, its queer habits, and the work which it did or left undone in the world.

        Taken singly, these accounts might be weak and trivial, but together, they would make history live and breathe. Think what flesh and color the diaries of an English tailor and an Italian vagabond have given to their times!

        Some such vague consideration as this has made me collect these scattered remembrances of my own generation, and of some of the men and women in it whom I have known.

        I have, of course, only spoken of the dead, whose work is done."  

From: Bits of Gossip, 1904

Rebecca Harding Davis wrote this at the end of a life of travels. She was born in Washington , PA in 1831. Her father was an English immigrant and her mother a native of Pennsylvania. When Rebecca was six years old she went with her parents to live in Wheeling West Virginia. Both parents were avid readers and this interest was passed on to Rebecca at an early age. The most lasting influence on her work was the literature of Nathaniel Hawthorne. She was attracted she said to his narratives taken from the commonplace. She graduated from Washington, PA Female Seminary in 1845. Shortly after graduation she wrote Life in the Iron Mills a strong picture of the common workers of the Mills. James T. Fields, the editor of the Atlantic Monthly accepted the essay. Her readers were stunned by the direct honesty of the portrayal of mill workers. Her career was launched. She later became a close friend of Fields and through him developed  relations with other well known nineteenth-century authors, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Louisa May Alcott, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and others. She also finally met Nathaniel Hawthorne and his wife Sophia and developed a rather one-sided friendship. While she remained loyal to Hawthorne, the Hawthornes described her work as "moldy," filled with "slimy gloom," and "the east wind and grime." Not the kind of friends or literary criticism one normally wants to cultivate. However, it is unlikely that Davis was aware of these private remarks.

Margret Howth: a story of to-day, was a success. It had not been planned as a Cinderella story, but under pressure from the publisher Fielding, Rebecca gave the book an upbeat, happy ever-after, ending, and  focused on the working-class struggle rather than the growing democratic woes of industrial capitalism as the country moved into Civil War. The romantic twist of plot is unlike the work that she produced in later years. The Civil War for Rebecca was real and devastating. In a series of short stories including "David Gaunt", "Blind Tom," "John Lamar" and "Paul Blecker" she champions the personalities and the real-life experiences of African American slaves in a manner uncharacteristic of other authors of the day. Written in the vernacular language of the protagonists, the stories are stark portrayals of the human condition. It was also during this intense period of writing that Rebecca met and married Lemuel Clarke Davis, a lawyer and journalist from Philadelphia. In 1863 she moved to Philadelphia into the home of her husband's sister. Not a good move, she began to have health problems and then was faced with nursing her ailing husband and his ailing sister. Pregnant and under stress, she stopped writing and apparently worked through a severe depression precipitated by her father's death. In 1864 she gave birth to Richard Harding Davis who was to become one of the most outstanding journalists and travel writers in America.  . She soon gave birth to Charles and later to a daughter, Nora. 

When she writes of the Civil War she does so with a clear eye. It is remarkable how familiar is the human condition in a time of War.  

" There was one curious fact which I do not remember ever to have seen noticed in histories of the war, and that was its effect upon the nation as individuals. Men and women thought and did noble and mean things that would have been impossible to them before or after. A man cannot drink old Bourbon long and remain in his normal condition. We did not drink Bourbon, but blood. No matter how gentle or womanly we might be, we read, we talked, we thought perforce of nothing but slaughter. So many hundreds dead here, so many thousands there, were our last thoughts at night and the first in the morning. The effect was very like that produced upon a household in which there has been a long illness. There was great religious exaltation and much peevish ill temper. Under the long, nervous strain the softest women became fierce partisans, deaf to arguments or pleas for mercy.  (p.125)

In her old age she looks back at her life and reflects on the process of aging and the insights it brings. Her short story "A Night in the Mountains" takes place as a husband and wife travel to Waynesville where the wife meets an old lover. Confronted by her past she must come to terms with her romantic dreams and the reality of her age, her marriage and the coarse stranger who had been her lover who now threatens a man she thought she did not love. In short, it is a mid-life crisis played out in the mountains of North Carolina. It is also a tribute to domesticity and a clear-eyed look at what one values in life. She died in 1910, at the age of 79.

She closes Bits of Gossip with this sage reflection on her many journeys:

 "For it is a mistake to talk of the twilight of age, or the blurred sight of old people. The long day grows clearer at its close, and the petty fogs of prejudice which rose between us and our fellows in youth melt away as the sun goes down. At last we see God's creatures as they are.

  So now, when I look back at the long road down which I have come, it seems to me to be filled with men and women who could have sounded the call which leads the world to great deeds. But the bugle never was put to their lips.

        I see now, too, how unselfish and true were most of the folk who jostled me every day on my journey. I used to like or dislike them as Democrats or Republicans, whites, Indians or negroes, criminals or Christians.

 Now, I only see men and women slaving for their children; husbands and wives sacrificing their lives to each other; loveable boys, girls with their queer new chivalric notions. I see the fun, the humor, the tragedy in it all; the desperate struggle of each one, day by day, to be clean and decent and true."(p.232) 

Oxford Companion to Women's Writing in the United States (Green Library Ref. PS147.094 1995) more than 400 biographies of American women authors writing in a variety of genres and in a variety of fields. Index, timelines, and bibliography are included.

American Women Writers: Bibliographic Essays   Bibliographic essays by various critics cover 24 major American women authors. Includes information on editions and manuscripts.

Notable American Women, 1607-1950: a Biographical Dictionary, 1971 v. 1-3 and Vol. 4. The Modern Period, 1980 provides long, scholarly articles on American women of various fields. Volume 4 covers women who died between 1951 and 1975.

Rose, Jane Atteridge. Rebecca Harding Davis. New York: Twayne ;  Toronto: MAxwell Macmillan ;  New York: Maxwell Macmillan International, 1993.

Davis, Rebecca Harding. Rebecca Harding Davis: Writing Cultural Autobiography. Ed. Janice Milner Lassiter and Sharon M. Harris. Nashville: Vanderbilt UP, 2001.

A new edition of the 19th century American writer's autobiography, with a previously unpublished family memoir, and an introduction providing cultural and generic context.