Life in the Iron Mills

A Note from the Publisher

A Note from the Publisher Life in the Iron Mills was The Feminist Press's first rediscovered classic. It inaugurated our "reprint" series. It has sold more than 26,000 copies in 9 printings over 12 years. Rebecca Harding Davis's name has been added to the list of major nineteenth-century writers of short fiction. In part to celebrate the fifteenth birthday of The Feminist Press in 1985, in part to acknowledge Davis as a fiction writer, we have produced this newly expanded edition of Life in the Iron Mills to include two stories that mirror Davis's own life as a nineteenth-century woman artist who felt keenly the conflict between her life and her art. As Tillie Olsen's Biographical Interpretation indicates, "The Wife's Story" and "Anne" portray lives of women artists "thwarted" not only by all that constrained women, but also by their own intense fidelity to husbands and families. "The Wife's Story" first appeared in the July 1864 issue of the Atlantic Monthly; "Anne" is reprinted from Davis's first collection of short stories, Silhouettes of American Life. originally published by Scribner's in 1892. ...