Rebecca Harding Davis

Rebecca Harding Davis (1831–1910) was born in Washington, Pennsylvania, and raised from childhood in Wheeling, in present-day West Virginia, graduating as valedictorian of the Washington Female Seminary in 1848. Her novella Life in the Iron Mills, published anonymously in the Atlantic Monthly in April 1861, drew on the ironworking town she knew to argue for an unflinching realism years before the movement had a name, and is now regarded as one of its founding works. She married the lawyer and editor L. Clarke Davis in 1863 and went on to write a dozen novels and hundreds of stories and essays; her eldest son, Richard Harding Davis, became a celebrated war correspondent and novelist in his own right. She died at his home in Mount Kisco, New York, in 1910.