Rebecca Harding Davis was at once emblematic of and ahead of her time. As a devoted wife and mother of three for whom home and family were central, she embodied an ideal of nineteenth-century middle-American womanhood. As a writer, she broke with the tradition of sentimental fiction expected from women writers of her day to pioneer the development of realism. "Life in the Iron-Mills," which appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in 1861 as Davis's first published work, predated Emile Zola's entry into realistic fiction by six years. It is perhaps the first American story to treat the industrial workplace, ghettoized poverty, and an immigrant subculture as the matter of America. In a career that spanned 50 years in which she wrote short fiction, serialized novels, essays, and children's stories, Davis exposed racism, political corruption, and the subjugation of women and led the way in developing psychologically complex female characters.

Despite this legacy, most scholars who have studied Davis's works in depth concur that she did not fulfill the promise shown in "Life in the Iron-Mills." To earn more money for her family, Davis eventually decided to favor quantity over quality. On the advice of her publisher she lightened her dark view of the human condition, and on the advice of her husband, a crusading journalist, she sometime advocated social causes in her fiction and was then criticized for being didactic. While she never abandoned her quest to write serious, honest fiction, her commitment was likely compromised under these influences.

Rather than lamenting these choices, in Rebecca Harding Davis Jane Atteridge Rose uses them to demonstrate the tenuous position of the woman writing in the nineteenth century. That Davis was able to make a respectable name for herself in her chosen profession at a time when rigorous intellectual pursuits were discouraged among women is remarkable. Rose's study is the first to weave into its analysis of Davis's work a sustained and detailed discussion of the author's life.

"The most distinctive feature of Rebecca Harding Davis's writing," Rose argues, "is its juxtaposition of antithetical values: vocation and family, egoism and self-denial, faith and cynicism, the material and the spiritual." While Davis's creative mediation of these opposing forces was conscious, there is also in her work evidence of an unconscious effort to reconcile the contradictions between the conventional choices she embraced in her personal life and the free-minded values she explored in her fiction. This effort may intrude on Davis's resolution of her works, Rose writes, but it also provokes fruitful analysis. Rebecca Harding Davis is an effort to reclaim a place in America s social history and its literary canon for a writer whose life and work are instructive to both. Davis's writing, Rose concludes, "stands as an artifact of a pioneer critical realist who was also a typical nineteenth-century American woman.