Rebecca Harding Davis is a pioneer of realist fiction in American literature and a journalist whose social commentary was nationally acclaimed. Her work was forgotten soon after her death, but  the 1972 reprinting of her ground-breaking novella Life in the Iron Mills began a recovery of her as an important American writer. The story, which was first published in the April 1861 edition of the Atlantic Monthly, launched a fifty-year career which would produce a corpus of 500 published works.

Born June 24, 1831 in Washington, Pennsylvania to Rachel Leet Wilson and Richard W. Harding, Davis spent her first five years in Florence, Alabama. Her mother was raised in the home of a prominent family in Washington, Pennsylvania; her father was an English immigrant. Her parents, younger brother Wilson and Rebecca moved north to settled in Wheeling, Virginia (not yet West) in 1837.

Nurtured by her mother's erudition and facility with language as well as her father's storytelling, Rebecca had the kind of secure childhood likely to nourish a child's love for story and writing. Reading was her favorite past-time. She often climbed into the backyard tree-house with Bunyan, Maria Edgeworth or Sir Walter Scott in tow. Most influential was her reading of Nathaniel Hawthorne, to whom she attributes the commonplace subject matter of her own writing. Schooled at home until she was fourteen by her mother and various tutors, Davis entered Washington Female Seminary in 1845. After graduating in 1848 (as valedictorian and with honors), the young woman returned home to help her mother manage a bustling household of seven. During the twelve years between graduation and the publication of her first work of fiction, she began honing her writing skills by writing for the Wheeling Intelligencer.

The transformation of her life occurred when James. T. Fields, editor of the Atlantic Monthly, wrote Davis that her novella Life in the Iron Mills would be published in the prestigious journal he edited. She was paid $50, an amount which would impress any nineteenth-century fiction writer, and offered $100 advance on another. Life in the Iron Mills catapulted her into fame and into the literary circles of the Boston and Concord Brahmins. She accepted an invitation offered by the Fields and Hawthornes in 1862. On that trip she met her literary ancestor Nathaniel Hawthorne and his wife Sophia, Ralph Waldo Emerson, transcendentalist philosopher and educator Bronson Alcott, kindergarten founder Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, physician and writer Oliver Wendell Homes, as well as James T. and Annie Fields. Thus, the thirty-year old Rebecca embarked upon a career which would make her one of the nation's first social historians and pioneering literary artists.

Throughout her career, Davis wrote intentionally to effect social change for blacks, women, native Americans, immigrants, and the working class. One of the first writers to portray the Civil War non-polemically, expose political corruption in the North, and unmask bias in legal constraints on women, Davis's primary contribution to literary history rests in the innovations she introduced into American literature. Life in the Iron Mills must be considered a central text in the origins of American realism, American proletarian literature, and American feminism, according to Jean Pfaelzer. The story was revolutionary in its compelling portrait of the working class's powerlessness to break the oppressive chains of industrial capitalism. She wrote realist fiction with a naturalistic bent two decades before William Dean Howells and six years before Emile Zola wrote theirs. Her fiction anticipated Kate Chopin's portraits of women's lives thwarted by social confines, Stephen Crane's study of the psychic effects of a soldier's experience of the Civil War, and Upton Sinclair's indictment of industrial capitalism.

In the last ten years, Davis's writing has compelled a growing interest not only in labor and Civil War issues, but also in the problem of the woman artist. Our understanding of Davis's stance on this aspect of her work has been complicated by a review in her own time of the ultraconservative tract Pro Aris et Focis: A Plea for our Altars and Hearths which misattributed the work to Davis. The error has been repeated in modern times in Tillie Olsen's 1972 biographical interpretation of Life in the Iron Mills and in the 74th volume of the Dictionary of Literary Biography. This recurrent blunder resulted in Davis's stance on the woman question being misrepresented. Although Davis did not write Pro Aris, she was indeed a conservative feminist whose anti-Calvinist Christian views explain much of the journalistic work of her later years. The place of woman in society was a recurrent refrain in her fiction and journalistic essays. A genuine admirer of Lucretia Mott, Davis herself could not be described as an activist except in her writing. She believed that change occurs more readily and permanently by contending with the social order without seeking its collapse. In her constant advocacy for opportunity for women, Davis's medium was print; her instrument, the pen. Her strategy disclosed the stultifying attitudes or conditions that stymied women's pursuit of meaningful work.  She strategically challenged the nineteenth-century ideology of domesticity simultaneous with affirming what she believed were the rewards inherent woman's domestic role as wife and mother. Most scholars agree that her work, especially in fiction, suffered because she had so little time to devote to her work. She had, since publishing "The Wife's Story" been concerned about the psychological realities of women denied the chance for career and marriage and creative expression. Finally, though, she seemed pleased at the end of her life that she and her husband prominent newspaper editor and abolitionist Clarke Davis, together with their two sons and daughter were among America's most prominent families during 1890-1910. Clarke had developed a close friendship with President Grover Cleveland who appointed the Davis's son Charles Belmont Davis to the post of American Consul to Italy. Her son Richard Harding Davis became famous as a novelist, playwright, and war correspondent.  He was a close friend of  President Theodore Roosevelt. Rebecca Harding Davis died at the home of  son Richard in Mount Kisco, New York of heart failure.  Her funeral, as was her husband's six years prior, was held in her home at South Twenty-first Street in Philadelphia.  She was cremated and interred next to her husband at Leverington Cemetery in her husband's hometown of Roxborough, Philadelphia.  The joint tombstone foreshadows her long erasure as a renowned writer in her own right: "L. Clarke Davis 1834-1904 and his Wife."

In the preface to her 1904 autobiography, Bits of Gossip which was published ten years before her death, Davis contends that writers should create "history that will live and breathe." She had written in 1891 in "Women and Literature" that the number of women writers should and would grow, and expressed her belief that these women would write with a noble purpose: to divulge the harsh realities of life and demand change, a program shaped by her own identity as a nineteenth-century Christian woman.  Her entire corpus teaches me much about writing as social reform and the problems of the woman artist.  As her tombstone reads, Davis's final word on her own life and work was silence, but a host of  readers are now finding it instructive for our own cultural milieu as the twentieth-century recedes.