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Chapter 3 sh a ron m. h a r r is Rebecca Harding Davis (83–90) Although born in a small town in Alabama, Rebecca Harding Davis lived in Wheeling, (West) Virginia, from the age of six until her marriage to L. Clarke Davis in 863, settling thereafter in Philadelphia. It was the environment of Wheeling, a cotton and iron manufactory town, which gave Davis the background for her most famous story, “Life in the Iron-Mills” (86). Considered one of the pioneers of mid-century realism, Davis became a regular contributor to the major U.S. literary periodicals of the day—including the Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, Scribner’s, Galaxy, and North American Review—and to popular magazines such as Peterson’s, Youth’s Companion, and St. Nicholas. The 860s were prolific years for her as a writer and immensely complicated years for her personally: she published more than a dozen stories in the Atlantic, married at the age of thirty-two, serialized and then published in book form three novels (Margret Howth, Dallas Galbraith, and Waiting for the Verdict) and serialized a novella (“David Gaunt”), gave birth to three children (Richard Harding Davis, Charles Belmont Davis, and Nora Davis), suffered a severe illness after the birth of her first child, and became a contributing editor for the New York Daily Tribune. But the 860s were only the beginning of Davis’s lifelong career as a remarkably talented and prolific author. She continued to publish her work until shortly before her death at age seventy-nine. She published fiction and nonfiction on such diverse topics as the effects of industrial capitalism, race relations in the postwar United States, women’s need for economic independence , the abuse of the mentally ill, the need for changes in the laws that limited women’s rights in marriage, and the devastating effects of U.S. imperialism in the 890s. 60 | sharon m. harris The Davis family was a literary dynasty as well. Davis maintained her standing as a major writer throughout her life. Her husband was a highly regarded journalist, editing the Philadelphia Inquirer and later the Philadelphia Ledger. Her eldest son, Richard, became a popular novelist and journalist (and the male model for the popular Gibson Girl portraits), and her younger son, Charles, wrote fiction and nonfiction, including an epistolary biography of his brother, Adventures and Letters of Richard Harding Davis (97). Only Nora declined the writing profession, although she seems to have moved in notable social circles.¹ Davis was also involved in and vocal about several reform movements of the nineteenth century. Not surprisingly, considering her views on women’s need for economic and legal independence, she supported suffrage; she was also ardent in her belief in the need for the abolition of slavery, temperance laws, and individual acts of charity (though she did not support the rise of the large charitable institutions because she felt they removed the personal interaction necessary for true charity). Through these activities and her writing career, Davis came to know many of the most renowned writers and political leaders of the nineteenth century. Her autobiography, Bits of Gossip (904), recounts the many people—famous and unknown, honorable and disreputable, from the North and the South—whom she knew during her lifetime. Her voice of protest never failed her, and in the last years of her life she wrote fifteen articles on topics relating to national and cultural agendas. One such essay, “One Woman’s Question” (907), was particularly striking in its denigration of the corruption that seemed to be pervading U.S. society—not just in its governing bodies, which garnered much public attention, but in individual instances of vulgarity and dishonesty. She saw such instances as “the symptoms of a creeping paralysis which threatens us almost unnoticed,” maintaining to the end her refusal to ignore the reality of American life and to insist on the potential for a more honorable and democratic future (33). Davis died on 29 September 90, in Mount Kisco, New York, on a visit to her son Richard’s home. Davis did not write in her letters, or in the fragments of her diary that are extant , any philosophical commentaries about writing or about herself as a writer. Instead, her attitudes about writing and her identity as an author are revealed in the letters she exchanged with her editors and publishers. The letters selected for this volume reflect...

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