About Rebecca Harding Davis

     Rebecca Harding Davis did more than take notice of people. She absorbed them.  She accepted their differences. She valued their differences.  She recognized that differences, both good and bad, not only formed an individual’s character, but also influenced her own and had the potential to influence the character of others. Davis realized her employment of words could unlock a door to power, a door often closed to nineteenth-century women. Once that door opened, Davis fully exercised that power with distinct, literary portraits.  Elizabeth D. Cichowski, personal website

     The remarkable depth and originality of vision in [“Life in the Iron-Mills”] has garnered it a place as one of the pioneering documents in American literature's transition from romanticism to realism, and the naturalistic plot leading to Hugh Wolfe's death challenges our traditional conceptions about the influences behind the movement from realism to naturalism in the United States.  Sharon M. Harris, Rebecca Harding Davis and American Realism

     Her critique of industrialism and important nineteenth-century social issues is matched only by the fervor of her compassionate spirit.  Janice Milner Lasseter,
Society for the Study of American Women Writers website

     Davis had three main concerns in her writing: “race, regionalism and women.”  She explored “the fallacies of domesticity as a protective social contract,” often depicting women who “seek to satisfy their artistic and intellectual hunger often stimulated by the loneliness of marriage and the poverty of daily life.”  Jean Pfaelzer, Legacy Profile: Rebecca Harding Davis

     "The most distinctive feature of Rebecca Harding Davis's writing is its juxtaposition of antithetical values: vocation and family, egoism and self-denial, faith and cynicism, the material and the spiritual."  Jane Atteridge Rose, Rebecca Harding Davis

     Davis was first and foremost a journalist and wrote on a wide range of political, economic and social topics. She also devoted much effort to describing the character of the American common-man, from a multi-cultural standpoint, a significant contribution to national identity.  Ruth Stoner, “Ralph Swan Meets Ragged Dick: Rebecca Harding Davis and the Anti-Horatio Alger Myth”