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Rebecca Harding Davis

 
 
Columbia Encyclopedia: Rebecca Harding Davis
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Davis, Rebecca Harding, 1831-1910, American novelist, b. Washington, Pa.; mother of Richard Harding Davis. Her early nonfiction pieces, particularly those collected under the title Life in the Iron Mills (1861), and her first novel, Margaret Howth (1862), foreshadowed the naturalistic techniques of later 19th-century writers by showing how a dismal environment can warp character.

Bibliography

See her autobiographical Bits of Gossip (1904); biography by G. Langford (1961).

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Works: Works by Rebecca Harding Davis
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(1831-1910)

1861"Life in the Iron Mills." Based on Davis's experiences among mill workers in Wheeling, Virginia (later West Virginia), the story highlights the horrific conditions endured by the workers and contrasts their virtue to the self-serving attitude of the mill owners. First published in the Atlantic Monthly, it wins acclaim for Davis and is considered one of the first works of American realism, in which she invited her readers, "Come right down with me--here in the thickest fog and mud and effluvia."
1862"John Lamar." Appearing in the Atlantic Monthly, the story concerns a slave who, when incited by an abolitionist, murders his master. It and Davis's subsequent stories, "David Gaunt" (September 1862) and "Paul Becker" (May 1863), are among the first realistic stories inspired by the war. Davis also publishes Margaret Howth: A Story of Today, a novel about a young girl forced to work in an Indiana wool mill after she is abandoned by her fiancé. First published in the Atlantic Monthly, it receives warm reviews and popular success. It is now considered overly sentimental--a result of the changes editor James T. Fields had required to give the book a "sunny" conclusion.
1868Waiting for the Verdict. Davis's novel treats the central question of how freed slaves would be integrated into American life. Henry James attacks the novel's gloominess in his review, prompting a defense by Harriet Beecher Stowe.
1874John Andross. Davis's novel draws on and calls attention to political corruption in the Grant administration. It cites the Whiskey Ring scandal, in which a group of distillers and public officials defrauded the government of liquor taxes.

Quotes By: Rebecca Harding Davis
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"Our young people have come to look upon war as a kind of beneficent deity, which not only adds to the national honor but uplifts a nation and develops patriotism and courage. That is all true. But it is only fair, too, to let them know that the garments of the deity are filthy and that some of her influences debase and befoul a people."

Wikipedia: Rebecca Harding Davis
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Rebecca Blaine Harding Davis (1831-1910; born Rebecca Blaine Harding) was an American author and journalist. She is deemed a pioneer of literary Realism in American literature. Her most important literary work is the novella Life in the Iron Mills published in the April 1861 edition of the Atlantic Monthly. Throughout her lifetime, Harding Davis sought to effect social change for blacks, women, Native Americans, immigrants, and the working class, by intentionally writing about these marginalised groups' plight in the 19th century.

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Life and work

Rebecca Blaine Harding was born in Washington, Pennsylvania, on June 24, 1831,[1] to Richard and Rachel Leet Wilson Harding. After an unsuccessful entrepreneurial spell in Big Spring, Alabama, the family finally settled in Wheeling, West Virginia, in 1836. Wheeling's rapid transformation into a factory town in the first half of the nineteenth century profoundly affected the themes and the vision of Davis's later fiction.

When she was 14, she was sent back to Washington, Pennsylvania, to attend the Washington Female Seminary, from where she graduated as class valedictorian in 1848. After returning to Wheeling, she joined the staff of the local newspaper, the Intelligencer, submitting reviews, stories, poems, and editorials, and also serving briefly as an editor in 1859.

Life in the Iron Mills, published in the Atlantic Monthly in April 1861, is regarded by many critics as a pioneering document marking the transition from Romanticism to Realism in American literature. The successful publication of the short story also provided her with acclaim in the literary circles of her time.

On her journey back from a meeting with her publisher, James Fields, Rebecca met L. Clarke Davis in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, whom she married on March 5, 1863. The following year she gave birth to their first son, Richard Harding Davis, who was to become a writer and journalist himself. Their second son, Charles Belmont, was born in 1866; their daughter, Nora, in 1872.

From 1869 onwards, Rebecca Harding Davis was a regular contributing editor to the New York Tribune and the New York Independent. In 1889, however, she resigned from the Tribune in order to protest editorial censorship of her articles.

On September 29, 1910, Rebecca Harding Davis died of a stroke at her son Richard's house in Mt. Kisco, New York.

Works

Books

  • Margret Howth (1861)
  • Waiting for the Verdict (1867)
  • Kitty's Choice or Berrytown and Other Stories (1873)
  • John Andross (1874)
  • A Law unto Herself (1878)
  • Natasqua (1886)
  • Kent Hampden (1892)
  • Silhouettes of American Life (1892)
  • Doctor Warrick's Daughters (1896)
  • Frances Waldeaux (1897)
  • Bits of Gossip (1904)

Short Fiction

  • "Life in the Iron Mills" Atlantic Monthly (1861)
  • "David Gaunt" (1862)
  • "John Lamar" (1862)
  • "Paul Blecker" (1863)
  • "Ellen" (1865)
  • "The Harmonists" (1866)
  • "In the Market" (1868)
  • "A Pearl of Great Price" (1868)
  • "Put out of the Way" (1870)
  • "General William Wirt Colby" Wood's Household Magazine (1873)[2]
  • "Earthen Pitchers" (1873-1874)
  • "Marcia" (1876)
  • "A Day with Doctor Sarah" (1878)

Essays

  • "Men's Rights" (1869)
  • "Some Testimony in the Case" (1885)
  • "Here and There in the South" (1887)
  • "Women in Literature" (1891)
  • "In the Gray Cabins of New England" (1895)
  • "The Disease of Money-Getting" (1902)

Online texts

Notes

  1. ^ Ehrlich, Eugene and Gorton Carruth. The Oxford Illustrated Literary Guide to the United States. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982: 214. ISBN 0195031865
  2. ^ http://wheeling.weirton.lib.wv.us/people/others/colby.htm/

External links


This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)

 
 

 

Copyrights:

Columbia Encyclopedia. The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition Copyright © 2003, Columbia University Press. Licensed from Columbia University Press. All rights reserved. www.cc.columbia.edu/cu/cup/.  Read more
Works. The Chronology of American Literature, edited by Daniel S. Burt. Copyright © 2004 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.  Read more
Quotes By. Copyright © 2008 QuotationsBook.com. All rights reserved.  Read more
Wikipedia. This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Rebecca Harding Davis".  Read more