Welcome to Rebecca Harding Davis: Complete Works

Rebecca Harding Davis: Complete Works aspires to make Davis’s work conveniently accessible to all and to encourage the study of her life and writing. Best known for her pioneering critique of industrialization in “Life in the Iron-Mills” (1861), Rebecca Harding Davis (1831-1910) was a prolific author who contributed fiction in a variety of genres as well as essays and editorials to a wide range of nineteenth-century periodicals, including the Atlantic Monthly, Lippincott’s, the Independent, Galaxy, Peterson’s Magazine, the New York Tribune, the Saturday Evening Post, the Congregationalist, and the Youth’s Companion, to name a few.

Her work consistently strives to tell, as she puts it, “the story of to-day,” and to that end, this ongoing project includes Davis’s published writing as well as about seventy personal letters with annotations to describe historical references and allusions. New items are added to the archive on a regular basis.

The archive also includes a robust selection of Davis’s letters (most transcribed and annotated by Davis biographer Sharon M. Harris).

See Collections for a chronology of Davis's life, a bibliography of her published works, and a bibliography of scholarship.