Davis, Rebecca Harding (1831–1910)

US writer, a pioneer of American naturalism. She came to prominence with her short story ‘Life in the Iron-Mills’ (1861; a daringly frank depiction of the harsh conditions endured by factory workers) and also with her realistic Civil War stories. She later wrote essays and also several novels, including Waiting for the Verdict (1868), which depicts the racism faced by African-Americans. She was the mother of the journalist Richard Harding Davis.

She was born in Washington, Pennsylvania, and raised Wheeling in West Virginia, a prosperous manufacturing town that clearly provided her with much of her material for her early fiction. As a young woman she became involved in politics and social reform movements, and wrote journalism attacking social ills. Her first short story, ‘Life in the Iron-Mills’, which appeared in the leading literary journal Atlantic in April 1861, brought her critical acclaim and she soon got to know such figures as Emerson, Hawthorne, and Oliver Wendell Holmes. In 1862 she published her novel Margaret Howth, which also deals with the conditions of the working-classes.

She married in 1863. She continued to write, though most of her later works, increasingly sentimental, are seen as failing to match her abilities and promise. Among her notable words are the short stories ‘David Gaunt’ and ‘John Lamar’ – both realistic depictions of the Civil War – and the novels Waiting for the Verdict and John Andross (1874), an attack on political corruption.