Rebecca Harding Davis Archive
Best known for her pioneering critique of industrialization in “Life in the Iron-Mills” (1861), Rebecca Harding Davis (1831-1910) was a prolific author who contributed fiction, essays, and editorials to a wide range of nineteenth-century periodicals, including the Atlantic Monthly, Lippincott’s, the Independent, Galaxy, Peterson’s Magazine, the New York Tribune, the Saturday Evening Post, the Congregationalist, and the Youth’s Companion, to name a few. Davis’s works treat issues relevant to women’s rights, indigenous rights, Black rights, mental health awareness, and disability activism.
The Rebecca Harding Davis Archive aspires to make Davis’s work conveniently accessible to all and to encourage the study of her life and writing.
During the next two years of the Archive's development, major activities will include additional digitization efforts, the creation of resources for educators, and more public facing content detailing Davis’s life and work. The continued expansion of the Archive honors Davis’s legacy, amplifies minoritized voices, and engages diverse audiences with new perspectives.
Featured Scholarship:
Rebecca Harding Davis: A Life Among Writers
Sharon M Harris
"Rebecca Harding Davis is best known for her gritty short story “Life in the Iron-Mills,” set in her native Wheeling, West Virginia. Far less is known of her later career among elite social circles in Philadelphia, New York, and Europe, or her relationships with American presidents and leading international figures in the worlds of literature and the stage. In the first book-length biography of Davis, Sharon M. Harris traces the extraordinary life of this pioneering realist and recovers her status as one of America’s notable women journalists. Harris also examines Rebecca’s role as the leading member of the Davis family, a unique and nationally recognized family of writers that shaped the changing culture of later nineteenth-century literature and journalism..." Read More
“The Specter and the Spectator: Rebecca Harding Davis’s ‘The Second Life’ and the Naturalist Gothic.”
Alicia Mischa Renfroe
"I suggest that Davis’s version of the Naturalist Gothic calls attention to the female body not only as spectacle but also as specter—a living ghost that haunts the narrative, destabilizes the spectator’s gaze, and raises questions about social justice. In this sense, the specter provides a link between the Gothic tradition and Naturalism and, much like the disabled body, opens a space for recognizing elements of protest and social critique in Naturalist novels.In “The Second Life,” Davis uses the figures of the specter and the spectator to foreground injustice, providing a powerful reminder of cultural anxieties that resist easy solutions and clear-cut narrative closure..." Read More
"'Nothing beneath—all?': Rebecca Harding Davis' Critique of Possessive Individualism in 'Life in the Iron-Mills'"
Sean J. Kelly
"In The Lives and Deeds of Our Self-made Men, Vol.1 (1872), Harriet Beecher Stowe lauds men who, having "sprang from conditions of hard-working poverty," embody the promise of social mobility and, more importantly, the truth of American exceptionalism...According to Stowe's formulation, one's successful ability to make oneself by rising from poverty and disadvantage would seem to provide the retroactive evidence of one's status as a man with inalienable rights...Like Stowe, Rebecca Harding Davis links the notion of rights to something fundamental in humanity, an element associated with Christian grace that is essential to 'solv[ing] the darkest secrets of a world gone wrong.' Unlike Stowe, however, Davis suggests that a conception of inalienable rights requires that we focus on the subject's hidden cause rather than its social effects..." Read More
"Rebecca Harding Davis: Preserving History through the Art of Literary Journalism"
Robin L. Cadwallader
"Early efforts in the field of literary journalism are today generally attributed to male writers such as Stephen Crane, Mark Twain, and Richard Harding Davis, with few mentions of their female contemporaries or predecessors. However, thirty years before Crane published Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893), Rebecca Harding Davis’s “The Promise of the Dawn” (1863) had already enlightened readers on the effects of prostitution on women, children, and communities, as well as the inadequacies of religion and society to deal with defiled womanhood; before Mark Twain’s attempt at regional dialect in Tom Sawyer (1876), Davis had already worked to capture the different sounds she heard spoken, representing them in her numerous tales of the Civil War, Virginia border towns, and the South; before there was Richard Harding Davis – world-renowned journalist, war correspondent, and storyteller – there was Rebecca..." Read More
Noteworthy Additions to the Archive
The Rebecca Harding Davis Archive is actively working to recover Davis's lost and neglected texts. New and noteworthy additions to the Archive will appear here.
"Low Wages for Women"
November 1888
"If we may believe these statements, man is in full possession of the ship Labor, steers and sails it, while the poor shipwrecked woman clutches half drowning at the gunwale..."
"Life in the Iron Mills"
April 1861
"The sky sank down before dawn, muddy, flat, immovable. The air is thick, clammy with the breath of crowded human beings. It stifles me. I open the window, and, looking out..."
"Would Women Use the Ballot?"
October 1888
"Should the right of suffrage be extended to women, I am very sure that I for one should sit by the fire on election day while my cook and laundress voted. I do not believe..."
"Chip"
October 1874
"That night he went out of the castle to look at their possessions by moonlight. It was disobeying his mother to go out of the castle by night. We have all often heard what instantly happens to boys or birds who disobey their mothers..."
"Losing her Hold"
February 1889
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"She thrust her hand under the shroud now and pulled out a little bag of gold coin. They were the savings of years; pennies scrimped out of clothes, milk, meat. They were to pay for the handsome granite monument..."
"An American Family"
May 1903
"This account of an ordinary American family, its fortunes and its growth was given to me by one of its members. It is more significant because it is so commonplace. The story is true, except in two points..."