​Visiting Harriet’s Literary Neighborhood #6: Rebecca Harding Davis, Life in the Iron Mills

Dr. John Getz from Xavier University is leading us on a tour of Harriet's "Literary Neighborhood"--authors and work that interacted with her own life and work, even though they were often geographically far apart. CLICK HERE for the full series. ​

Thanks to the amazing success of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1852, Harriet Beecher Stowe was considered one of the major authors of the day.  She was important enough to be one of the founders of a prestigious new magazine of literature and culture, The Atlantic Monthly, in 1857. Four years later that magazine published the novella Life in the Iron Mills, launching the writing career of young Rebecca Harding from Wheeling in what was then Virginia.
 
In 1863, that young author, in the midst of a productive decade of novel writing, married and became Rebecca Harding Davis.  Scholar David Reynolds lists Davis with Emily Dickinson, Louisa May Alcott, and others in what he calls the American Women’s Renaissance from 1855 to 1865. 
 
But as the 1860s drew to a close, a strong backlash against the success of women authors, including Davis and even Harriet herself, was starting.  Harriet wrote letters protesting hostile reviews of both their works and invited Davis to write for Hearth and Home, a monthly magazine Harriet was co-editing.  Davis accepted.
 
The backlash against women authors continued, and Life in the Iron Mills fell into obscurity until fiction writer Tillie Olsen rediscovered it and convinced The Feminist Press to reprint it in 1972.  More than a century had passed since its original publication. 
 
Life in the Iron Mills is written in the poetic, symbolic style of Davis’s day, and the benevolent Quaker woman and her community at the end may remind you of Rachel Halliday and her family in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. But Davis’s subject—the plight of immigrants and the working class as the US industrialized—looks forward to the realism that would dominate American fiction after the Civil War and even to the naturalism that would appear in the 1890s.
 
You can read this groundbreaking novella free online through Project Gutenberg. We welcome your questions and comments about your reading experience.    

About the author:
Dr. John Getz, Professor Emeritus, Xavier University, retired in 2017 after teaching English there for 45 years.  He specializes in American literature, especially nineteenth century, as well as the intersections of literature and peace studies. He has written articles on a variety of authors including Edith Wharton, Sherwood Anderson, and Ursula Le Guin. He appears in the documentary film Becoming Harriet Beecher Stowe, scheduled for release in spring 2020 by Fourth Wall Films.   ​

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