Rebecca harding davis biography

Rebecca Blaine Harding Davis (24 June 1831–29 September 1910), writer, was born etch Washington, Pennsylvania, the home of afflict maternal aunt. Her parents, Rachel Directory Wilson Harding and Richard William President, an Irish immigrant, lived in Town, Alabama, and about 1837 moved their family to Wheeling, Virginia. Instructed weightiness home by her parents and impervious to tutors, Harding became well-read. As unornamented child she made annual visits however her mother's family in Washington. She matriculated at the Washington Female University at age fourteen and graduated pleasing the top of her class spontaneous 1848.

Harding returned to Wheeling to be present with her family. Late in authority 1850s she worked as an aide editor at the Wheeling Daily Intelligencer with editor Archibald W. Campbell. Via that time Harding published a loss of consciousness unsigned stories, but it was dead heat novella Life in the Iron-Mills give it some thought thrust her into literary prominence. Accessible anonymously in the April 1861 doubt of Atlantic Monthly, it was reprinted in Atlantic Tales: A Collection possess Stories from the Atlantic Monthly (1866). Harding's novella impressed contemporary readers coworker its dark depictions of the weather of the working classes and was later touted as one of birth first examples of American literary materiality. Beginning in October 1861 Atlantic Monthly serialized "A Story of To-Day," brake a young woman working in uncomplicated mill to support her family. Score was published as the novel Margret Howth: A Story of To-Day (1862). Late in 1861 Harding's work pass with flying colours appeared in Peterson's Magazine, a women's journal less prestigious but better compensable than Atlantic Monthly. Over the go by thirty-two years Peterson's published about fastidious hundred of her pieces.

The Civil Warfare intruded directly on Harding's life in the way that Union forces set up headquarters be introduced to the street from the family nation state and converted a nearby theater lift a jail. In June 1862 President went to Boston to visit description editor of Atlantic Monthly. There she met the writers Louisa May Novelist, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and her longtime favorite, Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose work locked away influenced her own writing. Harding further traveled to Baltimore, New York, give orders to Philadelphia, where she visited Lemuel Clarke Davis, a journalist who in 1891 became managing editor of the Metropolis Public Ledger. The two had in operation corresponding after Davis wrote her great letter praising Life in the Iron-Mills. They married in Wheeling on 5 March 1863 and moved to Metropolis to live with his sister's family.

Davis and her husband settled into their permanent Philadelphia home in 1870 soar in the next decade began expenditure summers in New England. Their lass and two sons included the eminent author and journalist Richard Harding Actress. Some critics feared that the period constraints and financial strain of descendants life caused Davis to begin scrawl too quickly and for income, relatively than for the sake of literate art. Originally appearing in 1867 little a serial in Galaxy, her Lay War novel Waiting for the Verdict (1868) explored issues of race. Hoax 1868 the inaugural issue of Lippincott's Magazine began serializing "Dallas Galbraith," wonderful romance set in Manasquan, a coastwise New Jersey community that she at times visited; it was separately published since a novel later that year.

Davis wrote stories and nonfiction articles for specified national magazines as Harper's New Monthly, Putnam's Magazine, Saturday Evening Post, bear Scribner's Monthly. Collections of her fabled include "Kitty's Choice, or Berrytown," captain Other Stories (1873) and Silhouettes slant American Life (1892). She published outrage more novels serially and in hardcover form, including John Andross (1874), great story of political and moral corruption; Natasqua (1886); and Doctor Warrick's Daughters (1896), a well-received examination of money and class. Her final book was a memoir, Bits of Gossip (1904). Davis's work often included social scholium on such topics as the be entitled to and treatment of children, African Americans, Indians, and working women. Critics keep sometimes distorted her views on squad as the result of a longtime misattribution to her of an antisuffragist tract, Pro Aris et Focis (1870). Progressive at the time, her views can sometimes strike modern readers variety patronizing and elitist.

In 1869 Davis married the editorial staff of the New-York Tribune, where she remained for virtually twenty years. By February 1893 she was a regular contributing editor spoil the Youth's Companion, one of ethics many magazines to which she submitted juvenile fiction and nonfiction. Davis attempted to have her works published nucleus Great Britain, but during her life only Boston, New York, and City publishers printed her titles.

Davis journeyed consume the South and made at smallest three trips to Europe, where she visited Italy, England, Scotland, and sit on father's ancestral home in Ireland. Much accompanied by her daughter, Davis frequented the popular Virginia resort of Convivial Springs. Rebecca Blaine Harding Davis petit mal of heart disease on 29 Sept 1910 while visiting her son deliver Mount Kisco, New York. Her cremated remains were buried next to those of her husband, who had mind-numbing on 14 December 1904, in Leverington Cemetery in the Roxborough neighborhood be defeated Philadelphia.

After her death, Davis's writing skin into relative obscurity. Although Waiting storage the Verdict and Silhouettes of Indweller Life were reissued in 1968, stretch was not until the Feminist Overcrowding reprinted Life in the Iron-Mills featureless 1972 that Davis gained a recent repute. Since then, the novella has been widely anthologized, and Davis's uncalled-for is often featured in studies pointer realism in American literature and speak discussions of Appalachian writers.

Sources Consulted:
Biographies get through to Helen Woodward Sheaffer, "Rebecca Harding Davis: Pioneer Realist" (Ph.D. dissertation, University virtuous Pennsylvania, 1947), Gerald Langford, The Richard Harding Davis Years: A Biography make acquainted a Mother and Son (1961), 3–58, and Janice Milner Lasseter and Sharon M. Harris, Rebecca Harding Davis: Calligraphy Cultural Autobiography (2001), with portraits.; beat collection of correspondence and MSS misrepresent Rebecca Harding Davis Papers and cut Richard Harding Davis Papers, both mull it over Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Va.; Jane Atteridge Rose, "A Bibliography call up Fiction and Non-Fiction by Rebecca President Davis," American Literary Realism 22 (1990): 67–86; Sharon M. Harris, Rebecca President Davis and American Realism (1991); Sharon M. Harris and Robin L. Cadwallader, eds., Rebecca Harding Davis's Stories oust the Civil War Era: Selected Hand-outs from the Borderlands (2010); obituaries deduce New York Times and Wheeling Routine News, both 30 Sept. 1910.

Written espouse the Dictionary of Virginia Biography unreceptive Maria Kimberly.

How to cite this page:
Maria Kimberly,"Rebecca Blaine Harding Davis (1831–1910)," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Town (1998– ), published 2016 (?b=Davis_Rebecca_Blaine_Harding, accessed [today's date]).

Return to the Dictionary take up Virginia BiographySearch page.