The ten stories gathered here show Rebecca Harding Davis to be an acute observer of the conflicts and ambiguities of a divided nation and position her as a major transitional writer between romanticism and realism. Instead of focusing on major Civil War conflicts and leaders, she takes readers into the intimate battles fought on family farms and backwoods roads.

The ten stories gathered here show Rebecca Harding Davis to be an acute observer of the conflicts and ambiguities of a divided nation and position her as a major transitional writer between romanticism and realism. Capturing the fluctuating cultural environment of the Civil War and Reconstruction eras, the stories explore such issues as racial prejudice and slavery, the loneliness and powerlessness of women, and the effects of postwar market capitalism on the working classes. Davis’s characters include soldiers and civilians, men and women, young and old, blacks and whites. Instead of focusing (like many writers of the period) on major conflicts and leaders, Davis takes readers into the intimate battles fought on family farms and backwoods roads, delving into the minds of those who experienced the destruction on both sides of the conflict. Davis spent the war years in the Pennsylvania and Virginia borderlands, a region she called a “vast armed camp.” Here, divided families, ravaged communities, and shifting loyalties were the norm. As the editors say, “Davis does not limit herself to writing about slavery, abolition, or reconstruction. Instead, she shows us that through the fighting, the rebuilding, and the politics, life goes on. Even during a war, people must live: they work, eat, sleep, and love.”

Before Women Had Rights, They Worked - Regardless. Life in the Iron Mills is a short story (or novella) written by Rebecca Harding Davis in 1861, set in the factory world of the nineteenth century. It is one of the earliest American realist works, and is an important text for those who study labor and women's issues. It was immediately recognized as an innovative work, and introduced American readers to ""the bleak lives of industrial workers in the mills and factories of the nation."" Reviews: Life in the Iron Mills was initially published in The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 0007, Issue 42 in April 1861. After being published anonymously, both Emily Dickinson and Nathaniel Hawthorne praised the work. Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward was also greatly influenced by Davis's Life in the Iron Mills and in 1868 published in The Atlantic Monthly""The Tenth of January,"" based on the 1860 fire at the Pemberton Mills in Lawrence, Massachusetts. Get Your Copy Now.

Representing four prominent American women writers who flourished in the period following the Civil War, this collection includes "Life in the Iron Mills" by Rebecca Harding Davis, "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, "The Country of the Pointed Firs" by Sarah Orne Jewett, and "Souls Belated" by Edith Wharton. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

This volume explores the lives and works of nine Northern women who wrote during the Civil War period, examining the ways in which, through their writing, they engaged in the national debates of the time. Lyde Sizer shows that from the 1850 publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin through Reconstruction, these women, as well as a larger mosaic of lesser-known writers, used their mainstream writings publicly to make sense of war, womanhood, Union, slavery, republicanism, heroism, and death. Among the authors discussed are Lydia Maria Child, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Sara Willis Parton (Fanny Fern), Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth, Mary Abigail Dodge (Gail Hamilton), Louisa May Alcott, Rebecca Harding Davis, and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps. Although direct political or partisan power was denied to women, these writers actively participated in discussions of national issues through their sentimental novels, short stories, essays, poetry, and letters to the editor. Sizer pays close attention to how these mostly middle-class women attempted to create a "rhetoric of unity," giving common purpose to women despite differences in class, race, and politics. This theme of unity was ultimately deployed to establish a white middle-class standard of womanhood, meant to exclude as well as include.

Conflict, exoticism, sensuality, eccentricity, and the sheer differences of the American South pervade this lively anthology, the first in fifty years to focus exclusively on the nineteenth-century tradition of southern local color. Its thirty-one stories, spanning the 1870s through the early 1900s, represent some of the best southern fiction to appear during the great flowering of American local color writing. The fifteen authors included here are those most admired by their contemporaries. Modern readers may recognize Kate Chopin, author of The Awakening; Charles Chesnutt, the courageous and gifted African American writer; or Joel Chandler Harris, whose Uncle Remus and Br'er Rabbit tales have remained continually in print. However some authors like suffragist Sarah Barnwell Elliott, are virtually unknown today, while others, like African Americans Paul Laurence Dunbar and Alice Dunbar-Nelson, are known primarily as poets or diarists. The editors' extensive introduction locates the stories in the context of contemporary and current history and culture, and each selection of tales begins with detailed information on the author. Also included are bibliographies and extensive notes. Showcasing the many styles, topics, and settings of southern local color, the anthology reconnects us to an unjustly neglected literary tradition. As the editors make clear, such tales of the South were essential to post-Civil War America's struggle to address--yet contain--cultural and geographic variety, racial mixtures, and the just clamor of women and African Americans for equality. From George Washington Cable's New Orleans to Thomas Nelson Page's Tidewater Virginia to the Appalachians imagined by Sherwood Bonner, these stories engage nation-shaping themes--war, segregation, immigration, depression, and suffrage--at the personal and community levels. In Southern Local Color we have a unique forum for pondering a timeless American question: how to reconcile our diversities with a unified national identity.

"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. This accessible treatment of Davis's life, based on deep research in archival sources, provides new perspective on topics ranging from sectional tensions in the border South to the gendered world of nineteenth-century publishing. It promises to be the authoritative treatment of an important figure in the literary history of West Virginia and the wider world"