1861: Harding Davis

Rebecca Harding is five years old in 1836 when her family moves to Wheeling, Virginia (now West Virginia), which was, at the time, a slave state.

"Life in the Iron Mills"

Harding is thirty, and living with her family in Wheeling, when she writes and publishes her first story.

It is published in the most prestigious journal in the United States at the time, the Atlantic Monthly, in the same month that the Civil War begins.

"Life in the Iron Mills" is a popular and critical success.

In 1863, Harding married Philadelphia lawyer L. Clarke Davis and took his name.

Legacy

Before her death in 1910, Harding Davis writes "over five hundred published works, including short stories, essays, sketches, novels, and children's writings" in a career that is "marked by success," but her subsequent work "never equaled [her first story] in power" (North Anthology American Literature, Shorter Ninth Edition: Beginnings to 1865, 1275).

Literary Realism

Literary critics subsequently praise "Life in the Iron Mills" as a "pioneering" work of literary realism. In a subsequent novel, Margaret Howth (1862), Harding Davis's narrator writes, "I want you to dig into this commonplace, this vulgar American life, and see what is in it. Sometimes I think it has a raw and awful significance that we do not see" (North Anthology American Literature, Shorter Ninth Edition: Beginnings to 1865, 1276).

"['Life in the Iron Mills]' achieved a renewed popularity--and brought Rebecca Harding Davis back into a prominent place in literary history--through its republication in 1972 in a Feminist Press volume edited by the fiction writer and essayist Tillie Olsen" (North Anthology American Literature, Shorter Ninth Edition: Beginnings to 1865, 1276).