Book Description
Word count: 1116. ... Read more

Book Description
Nineteenth-century fiction writer and journalist Rebecca Harding Davis (1831-1910) is best known for her novella Life in the Iron Mills. Its publicationin 1861 launched her stunning fifty-year career that yielded a corpus of some 500 published works, including short stories, novels, novellas, sketches, and social commentary. Davis's unique mode of writing anticipated literary realism twenty years before the time usually associated with its genesis. Today, her life and work continue to figure prominently in the study of American literature and culture.

Rebecca Harding Davis: Writing Cultural Autobiography is the annotated edition of her 1904 autobiography, Bits of Gossip, and a previously unpublished family history written for her children. The memoirs are not traditional autobiography; rather, they are Davis's perspective on the extraordinary cultural changes that occurred during her lifetime and of the remarkable--and sometimes scandalous--people who shaped the events. She provides intimate portraits of the famous people she knew, including Emerson, Hawthorne, Louisa May Alcott, Ann Stephens, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Horace Greeley. Equally important are Davis's commentaries on the political activists of the Civil War era, from Abraham Lincoln to Booker T. Washington, from the "daughters of the Southland" to Lucretia Mott, from Henry Ward Beecher to William Still.

Whereas Bits of Gossip expands our understanding of Davis as cultural critic and observer of life, the family history offers new information on Davis's early life and the influences that led her to become one of the nineteenth century's pioneering Realists and cultural commentators. Together they bring a human voice to the nineteenth-century American milieu. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Leaning away from the traditional autobiographical format
Rebecca Harding Davis (1831-1910) was a fiction writer and journalist, best known for her novella "Life in the Iron Mills", and who published approximately 500 works in her lifetime. Deftly edited for modern readers by the collaborative efforts of Janice Milner Lasseter and Sharon M. Harris, Rebecca Harding Davis: Writing Cultural Autobiography is the aptly annotated version of the autobiography of Rebecca Harding Davis, originally entitled "Bits of Gossip" and intended for her children. Leaning away from the traditional autobiographical format, Ms. Davis' life story focuses upon the cultural changes that were taking place during her life time, from the political fallout of the Civil War to close portraits of famous people she knew, such as Louisa May Alcott and Oliver Wendell Holmes. Rebecca Harding Davis is highly recommended for American history and biographical studies academic reference collections and supplemental curriculum reading lists. ... Read more