Rebecca Harding Davis

Rebecca Harding Davis was born in Pennsylvania in 1831, but lived much of her life in Wheeling, Virginia (now West Virginia), which served as the inspiration for the unnamed town in Life in the Iron Mills. Davis was a voracious reader and graduated as valedictorian in 1848 from her female seminary school in Pennsylvania. She is one of the progenitors of American literary realism and had a prolific literary career, working as a fiction writer, journalist, and editor. Her first completed work, Life in the Iron Mills, was an instant success and appeared in the ultra-prestigious Atlantic Monthly in April of 1861. Although the novella was originally published anonymously, Davis was still widely known as the author and gained attention from famous authors like Nathaniel Hawthorne and Emily Dickinson. Though she was never able to replicate the success of Life in the Iron Mills, Rebecca Harding Davis penned more than five hundred published works during her lifetime, including ten novels, over one hundred short stories, and many pieces of journalism. Her writing primarily grapples with themes of gender dynamics, social justice, poverty, and the Civil War. In 1863, she married a journalist named L. Clarke Davis and went on to have several children, one of whom also became a journalist. She died in 1910 at the age of 79, six years after writing her autobiography, Bits of Gossip.