Margret Howth: A Story of Today

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Ticknor and Fields, 1862 - American fiction - 266 pages
One of the earliest American writers of realistic fiction, Davis wrote about poor and working class women, factory life and social oppression, with the hope of affecting social change.
 

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About the author (1862)

Rebecca Harding Davis shocked readers with the grim realism of her stories, which appeared during a time when sentimental romances were popular. Her first published story, "Life in the Iron Mills," appeared anonymously in the Atlantic Monthly in 1861. The daughter of a prosperous businessman, Rebecca Harding grew up in Wheeling (then in Virginia) on the Ohio River. There she observed the industrial ironworkers' misery and struggle for existence and witnessed the harsh treatment of slaves, which she described in her first novel, Margaret Howth: A Story of Today (1862). She warned her son, writer and journalist Richard Harding Davis, against doing "hack work for money."

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