SOURCE: “Success and Failure of Rebecca Harding Davis,” in Midcontinent American Studies, Vol. 3, No. 1, Spring, 1962, pp. 44-9.

In the following essay, Austin details Davis's merits and shortcomings as an author, concluding that she succumbed to the mandates of the literary culture of her time.

Pioneer realist and sociological fiction writer, Rebecca Harding Davis (1831-1910) was born too early. In her struggle with the nineteenth century, the century won too many of the victories. Yet because of her successes as well as her traceable failures, her story provides an informative light on the times.

Born Rebecca Blaine Harding in Wheeling, she spent most of her early life in what is now West Virginia, becoming familiar with the steel mills, the farms of the Pennsylvania Dutch and the Quakers, the coal mining towns, and the institution of slavery.¹ Although she left the region upon her marriage to L. Clarke Davis...