Rebecca Harding Davis broke new ground as an American fiction writer and journalist. When her novella Life in the Iron Mills appeared in the April 1861 edition of The Atlantic Monthly, it startled readers with its depiction of the grim lives of the working class. The stark realism of this story was unprecedented. Building on the earlier forms of realism in works by Hannah Foster and Harriet Beecher Stowe, Davis inaugurated literary realism twenty years prior to the writers usually credited for its advent. Life in the Iron Mills launched Davis's fifty-year career, during which she wrote some five hundred published works, including short stories, novellas, novels, sketches, and social commentary. She was one of the first writers to portray the Civil War nonpolemically, to expose political corruption in the North, and to unmask bias in legal constraints on women.

Davis's importance to literary history rests primarily in the...