Article: Direct addresses, narrative authority, and gender in Rebecca Harding Davis's "Life in the Iron Mills."

When Rebecca Harding Davis died in 1910, eulogies recounted how her most famous work, "Life in the Iron Mills," published in the Atlantic Monthly nearly fifty years earlier, defied nineteenth-century assumptions about women's writing. According to the New York Times, many readers assumed that "the author must be a man" (the story was published without attribution at Davis's request): "The stern but artistic realism of the picture she put alive upon paper, suggested a man, and a man of power not unlike Zola's" (13). While the analogy is anachronistic--Zola was unknown in America in 1861--the suggestion that Davis wrote like a man is by no means unique. Elizabeth Smart ...

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