Life in the Iron Mills and Other Stories: Second Edition

By Rebecca Harding Davis

Book Overview

This 1861 classic of social realism--the first book to be reprinted by the Feminist Press in its series of rediscovered women writers--remains a powerful evocation of what Davis herself called "thwarted, wasted lives . . . mighty hungers . . . and unawakened powers." The New York Times Book Review said of the novella: "You must read this book and let your heart be broken." With an insightful biographical essay by Tillie Olsen, and with two short stories never before anthologized, this expanded edition is the most complete volume available from this important nineteenth-century writer.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0935312390
• ISBN13: 9780935312393
• Release Date: January 1993
• Publisher: Feminist Press
• Length: 248 Pages
• Weight: 0.57 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.0" x 7.0"

Customer Reviews

vivid tale of 1860's Welsh ironworkers in WVA mills

I read Life in the Iron Mills for a graduate English course on social-class-imagery in 18th & 19th cen Transatlantic (British and American) literature with Elisabeth Ceppi at Portland State. Ceppi asked us to read closely for the rhetoric of class attributes. There was much class-identifying-imagery to observe in Harding-Davis' 1860's rendering of the lives of impoverished Welsh miners transported into late-slave-era iron foundries of the American North. Mid-19th-cen feminist literature of this social-reform type is deeply informed by Protestant missionary enthusiasm to transform everyone into clean-living bourgeois church-goers. Thus Harding-Davis uses powerful polarities of dirt for workers, clean for bouregoisie, etc. It's so blunt and obvious that she could be accused of writing soap-opera ... as many of her mid-1800's female-writer colleagues were accused, sometimes justly. However her scenes of poverty, disease, and death in the mills are so heart-wrenching that her motives are clearly pure. Now that Tillie Olsen has rescued Harding-Davis' wonderful writing from obscurity, she is good to read for knowledge of American feminist writing history, for understanding of American class polarities in the ante-bellum era, and also for a true, scary story of life with the great unwashed.