SOURCE: “‘Marcia’ by Rebecca Harding Davis,” in Legacy, Vol. 4, No. 1, Spring, 1987, pp. 3-5.

In the following essay, Pfaelzer explores the autobiographical aspects of “Marcia”.

In “Marcia” (1876) Rebecca Harding Davis tells of sentiment and silence, of publishers, husbands, and a literary tradition that conspired to mute women.¹ In this powerful story about telling stories, Davis projects her own ambivalence about ambition onto her heroine, who attempts a desperate challenge to sentimentality.² Reversing the choices Davis made in her own life and fiction, “Marcia” tells of a young writer who suffers for her refusal to conform to the sentimental prototype and become a “literary domestic.”³

“I think I have something to say, if people only would hear it,” exclaims Marcia Barr, who has come to Philadelphia from post-Civil-War Mississippi, “vowing herself to literature,” a significant metaphor for a woman who has chosen the “business” of authorship over the “business” of...