Life in the Iron Mills and Other Stories

by Rebecca Harding Davis, Tillie Olsen (Editor)

This 1861 classic of social realism—the first book to be reprinted by the Feminist Press in its series of rediscovered women writers—remains a powerful evocation of what Davis herself called “thwarted, wasted lives . . . mighty hungers . . . and unawakened powers." The New York Times Book Review said of the novella: "You must read this book and let your heart be broken.” With an insightful biographical essay by Tillie Olsen, and with two short stories never before anthologized, this expanded edition is the most complete volume available from this important nineteenth-century writer.

You must read this book and let your heart be broken—New York Times Book Review

"One of the earliest recognitions in American literature of the existence of the very poor."—Michele Murray, National Observer

Suggested for course use in:
19th-century U.S. literature
Working-class studies

Rebecca Harding Davis (1831-1910) published 12 books and many serialized novels, stories, and essays.

Genres: Fiction, Short Stories, Classics, School, Historical Fiction, Literature, 19th Century

248 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1861

About the author

Rebecca Blaine Harding Davis (born Rebecca Blaine Harding) was an American author and journalist. She is deemed a pioneer of literary realism in American literature. She graduated valedictorian from Washington Female Seminary in Pennsylvania. Her most important literary work is the novella Life in the Iron Mills, published in the April 1861 edition of the Atlantic Monthly which quickly made her an established female writer. Throughout her lifetime, Davis sought to effect social change for blacks, women, Native Americans, immigrants, and the working class, by intentionally writing about the plight of these marginalized groups in the 19th century.

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Sandy · Rating 3 out of 5]

One spectacular story, two middling ones, and a mildly-interesting “biographical interpretation” by Tillie Olsen average out to three stars.

I would like to read more by and about Rebecca Harding Davis. The title story, the first story of hers to be published, which she had worked for years to perfect, demonstrates her immense power as a writer. The other two stories seem to reflect her struggle to balance her desire to develop her writing talent with her perceived duties and responsibilities as wife and mother. Although she continued to write following her marriage, she had neither time nor energy to hone her skills and realize her potential as an author. What a tragedy. What a loss for the literary world.

[Richard Derus · Rating 4 out of 5]

I RECEIVED MY DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

A cloudy day: do you know what that is in a town of iron-works? The sky sank down before dawn, muddy, flat, immovable. The air is thick, clammy with the breath of crowded human beings. It stifles me. I open the window, and, looking out, can scarcely see through the rain the grocer's shop opposite, where a crowd of drunken Irishmen are puffing Lynchburg tobacco in their pipes. I can detect the scent through all the foul smells ranging loose in the air.

Choosing to bring her story to us via a first-person introductory passage was a stroke of genius by Author Harding Davis. At first, I felt very nervous because the idea of first-person present-tense narration for a whole novella's length isn't, um, too terribly appealing to me; but we get into the action when she has the narrator say that the people he's going to talk about lived there thirty years ago and....

Well! All is on track, then! Stand down, adrenal gland.

But mere lines later, my mind hit another conceptual pothole:

She did not drink, this woman,—her face told that, too,—nothing stronger than ale. Perhaps the weak, flaccid wretch had some stimulant in her pale life to keep her up,—some love or hope, it might be, or urgent need. When that stimulant was gone, she would take to whiskey. Man cannot live by work alone.

Wow! That's not even a little bit judgey, is it. (And "nothing stronger than ale" must resound oddly in the modern Puritanical no-booze no-sex no-fun ear! The paeans to the clean air and the purity of this bygone world make me itch. The entire world drank some sort of beer or wine because drinking water could kill you via cholera and/or diphtheria and/or typhoid fever.) Kim Kelly (author of Top Ten Words Women Hate which is short and to the point besides having a great title), in her Foreword to this second Feminist Press edition, says of the author:
Rebecca Harding Davis was born into a life of relative ease and had next to nothing in common with the workers in her story, and yet she writes about them and the proletarian struggle with such compassion and depth of insight that it's hard to believe she was merely watching from the window.

I must decline to co-sign, Kim Kelly. To my elderly man-ears, this story sounds like the Abolition era's standard christian social-reform literature à la Uncle Tom's Cabin. Built into its very real sympathy is the distancing judgmental mind-set inescapable by a woman of Author Harding Davis's background. She isn't all about the judgments, it is true, because her point is to bring into sharp relief the inequitable, really iniquitous, world that has done this to Deb, the character described here. But baked into the clay is that vocabulary of blame and othering inescapable in 1861's world-view.

The capitalist mouthpiece character is a piece of work. He's called Kirby, but really could've been called Carnegie or Rockefeller. His anthem:

"I do not think. I wash my hands of all social problems,—slavery, caste, white or black. My duty to my operatives has a narrow limit,—the pay-hour on Saturday night. Outside of that, if they cut korl, or cut each other's throats, (the more popular amusement of the two,) I am not responsible."

In that unlovely speech, addressed to one Mitchell, the dilettante character of no special moral fiber but a deep and abiding aesthetic sensibility, one hears echoes of "I don't see race" and its ilk, doesn't one. Mitchell is moved to say in riposte, "Money has spoken!"

Kirby and Mitchell are discussing the existence of one of the mill-hands, Hugh Wolfe. He is a true Other, a man out of place in his place of residence. He has had a modicum of schooling; he is aesthetically aware of the world around him; therefore he is the subject of the other mill-hands' bullying. He has created a statue of great aesthetic interest to Mitchell, a carved woman whose anatomy Mitchell criticizes for being not starved-looking when Hugh tells him the korl sculpture is meant to be hungry. In a passage that felt to me more than a little codedly homoerotic, Wolfe, Kirby, and Mitchell pass around the idea of bodies on display (half-naked men abounding in the smelting-furnace heat, summer or winter) being essentially lower-class unless they are Art.

Mitchell ends his part of the conversation with a "cool, musical laugh." ::eyebrow:: Then Author Harding Davis delivers this about him:

Bright and deep and cold as Arctic air, the soul of the man lay tranquil beneath. He looked at the furnace-tender as he had looked at a rare mosaic in the morning; only the man was the more amusing study of the two.

The hairpins are dropping...nay, flying! And then she has him speak Scripture, "De profundis clamavi" no less!, at which juncture he is compared to the Devil. Now I do not know Author Harding Davis's other works, but these are Uranian markers in nineteenth-century gay parlance. Mitchell, and to a lesser degree Kirby, are assessing Hugh Wolfe as a sex object. And he's right there with 'em.

Think not? Thus Hugh of Mitchell, so recently departed and he fears and expects not to return:

Then flashed before his vivid poetic sense the man who had left him,—the pure face, the delicate, sinewy limbs, in harmony with all he knew of beauty or truth. In his cloudy fancy he had pictured a Something like this. He had found it in this Mitchell, even when he idly scoffed at {Hugh's} pain: a Man all-knowing, all-seeing, crowned by Nature, reigning,—the keen glance of his eye falling like a sceptre on other men.

And the rest of the story might as well have been A Tragic Gay Romance. I'm fine with that, and don't feel the need to chisel away my impression of what Author Harding Davis did because it might not be what she intended (note use of conditional).

If you've paid me the slightest attention at all, you'll know that the anti-capitalist message of the story is so in tune with my own thoughts about a properly run world that this really needs no belaboring. I was absolutely sure I'd enjoy this story when I read this:

Everything old is new again, including the tension between the workers who make and the bosses who take. How many more Hughs are there out there now, working dangerous, soul-sucking jobs instead of following their passions? How many more will have to suffer before this wretched capitalist system finally breaks down and sets us all free?

I don't know, Kim Kelly. But the short answer is "not soon enough."

[Werner · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Life in the Iron Mills" (1861) was one of the first major Realist works in American literature and created an immediate sensation in the literary world when it was first published, though it was subsequently forgotten and only re-discovered in relatively recent times by editor Olsen. I'd read, and really liked, it already back in the 90s, when we were home-schooling our girls and I was preparing to teach American literature (I made it required reading!). Since the additional material in this volume consists only of two more stories by Davis, one much shorter, and Olsen's "Biographical Interpretation," I selected it to read this month mainly because I could finish it by January (when I'll be starting a common read in one of my groups). I didn't expect it to be a five-star read, but it earned every one of them.

We should note at the outset that this book doesn't purport to be a collection of "the best of" Davis' voluminous short fiction, let alone anything like a comprehensive or representative collection (though Olsen or someone else hopefully will someday produce one!) Rather, it's a thematic one, linking three very different stories that nevertheless have a common underlying element: a protagonist who has artistic (in the broad sense --sculpture in one case, music in the other two-- talent and temperament, but whose situation doesn't afford any opportunity for it to be developed. Olsen makes a very convincing case that Davis could identify personally with this aspect of her protagonist's experience, and that this was an important part of the author's consciousness (see below).

In the title story, set in her native Wheeling, WV (then part of Virginia) the crippling situation protagonist Hugh Wolfe faces is that of poverty: wage slavery, working in an exhausting and dangerous job 12 hours a day, six days a week, for subsistence wages, with no chance for leisure or education. This is the first work of American literature that focuses on the laborers in this situation, and the first social criticism of the treatment the Industrial Revolution was meting out to them. It's gritty, powerful, and tragic, and deeply informed by the author's Christian faith; the sympathetically-treated faith of the Quakers plays a key role, with a trajectory of despair and ruin contending with one of hope and Christian redemption. And the language and imagery of the ending strongly evokes the eschatology of the Christian faith, with a rare appreciation of its socio-economic significance. Davis' achievement in bringing all this to life in what we now recognize as Realist style is remarkable, given her background and resources: she had no formal education beyond "female seminary" (essentially a boarding high school for girls, with a fairly limited curriculum), her reading didn't include Realist models --she adopted that mode of expression naturally, without outside influence and against the Romantic current of all the literature she knew-- and with her genteel class position, the direct observation of working-class life that forms the matrix of the story took a lot of focused effort.

In the other stories here, we have female protagonists whose family responsibilities tie them down to a degree that precludes fulfilling their aspirations for a singing career, or for a life lived in a milieu of aesthetic and intellectual stimulation. But these are not simply stereotypical feminist tracts (because Davis herself wasn't a stereotypical feminist). They recognize the profound truth that loving family ties are what life is all about, and that we get deep emotional satisfaction in return for what we give to spouses and kids who need us, and whom at one level we need. Like many worthwhile things, this can require tradeoffs and sacrifices --but real sacrifices, as opposed to mock ones, involve some pain, some giving up something that has real worth to us, and Davis also recognizes that truth (at the same time that she sees that the grass on the other side of the fence isn't always as green as we paint it in imagination). She recognized all of this from the personal experience of a woman who sacrificed a lot, in terms of time for writing and artistic development, to the needs and wants of her husband and three kids (the youngest born when Davis was 41). That gives these stories a realism, an appreciation of shades of grey, that lifts them above white-and-black tracts (feminist or traditionalist) posing as fiction. And even though I'm a male, I can relate, because like Davis I pursue my writing in the bits and pieces of time I can grab in the midst of family responsibilities (including, in my case, a day job to support the family!) and family fellowship. (The alternatives don't have to be confined to just two, all of one and none of the other!)

At 89 pages, plus 17 pages of notes, Olsen's bio-critical material isn't a full-length biography (that remains to be written!), but it's substantial and fascinating, and added a good deal to my knowledge of this author. (It was written with access to Davis' own diary, and letters.) My only real criticisms would be that the placement of this section between the title story and the other two is awkward, especially since it includes spoilers for both the other stories (it would work better placed at the end, so it would be more apt to be read in that order, as I did in fact read it), and that as a Marxist scholar, Olsen isn't really able to sympathize with Davis' faith.

While Olsen considers the title story to be Davis' only really great work, and finds her subsequent productions mostly flawed, she makes a convincing case that at least some of them have enduring worth. Personally, I'd say that "The Wife's Story" and "Anne," which appear here, and "Balacchi Brothers" (which I've read elsewhere) are on a par with the short fiction of Jewett, Freeman and Garland. This book has whetted my interest in reading more by this author, and I hope eventually to do so!

[John Pistelli · Rating 5 out of 5]

This debut novella by Rebecca Harding Davis, first published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1861, is now a classic after its rescue from oblivion by Tillie Olsen and the Feminist Press in the 1970s. An early example of realism in American fiction, which had been in the mid-19th century dominated by variations of romance (e.g., Hawthorne) and sentimentalism (e.g., Stowe), Harding's story has since earned comparison with Zola, Tolstoy, and Dreiser for its grim, detailed portrayal of laboring life. It is the tale of Wolfe, resident and worker in a milltown based on Davis's native Wheeling. While Wolfe is subject to all the deprivations of his co-workers, who live in foul hovels and medicate their wounded souls with alcohol, he nevertheless stands out for being more educated and refined, an artistic soul in a hellish world, judged to be disablingly feminine by his peers as he devotes all of his free time to art:

In the mill he was known as one of the girl-men: "Molly Wolfe" was his sobriquet.…

For other reasons, too, he was not popular. Not one of themselves, they felt that, though outwardly as filthy and ash-covered; silent, with foreign thoughts and longings breaking out through his quietness in innumerable curious ways: this one, for instance. In the neighboring furnace-buildings lay great heaps of the refuse from the ore after the pig-metal is run. Korl we call it here: a light, porous substance, of a delicate, waxen, flesh-colored tinge. Out of the blocks of this korl, Wolfe, in his off-hours from the furnace, had a habit of chipping and moulding figures,—hideous, fantastic enough, but sometimes strangely beautiful: even the mill-men saw that, while they jeered at him. It was a curious fancy in the man, almost a passion. The few hours for rest he spent hewing and hacking with his blunt knife, never speaking, until his watch came again,—working at one figure for months, and, when it was finished, breaking it to pieces perhaps, in a fit of disappointment. A morbid, gloomy man, untaught, unled, left to feed his soul in grossness and crime, and hard, grinding labor.

One night, the mill-worker's son brings an entourage through the iron-works, and they discover one of Wolfe's sculptures. This leads them to a philosophical discussion of what should be done given that industrial society needs laborers—mere "hands"—even though said laborers have talents and abilities that could lift them above their impoverished life. One of those touring the factory is Mitchell, the "man of culture," in whom Wolfe recognizes his kin in aesthetic sensibility. Mitchell, a reader of "Kant, Novalis, Humboldt," recognizes the genius in Wolfe's sculpture—the "Korl Woman" of the novella's alternate title—because he sees the spiritual aspiration and soul-hunger in the represented woman's features. Following the German Romantic ideas Mitchell is familiar with, Davis demonstrates through a brilliant allegory how aesthetics may be the common ground of humanity, manifesting across differences of class and culture the universal spirit of reason, a spirit insulted when men and women are immured in poverty and labor. The story is at its best in the scene in the factory, where the interplay of powerful physical description, philosophical dialogue, and aesthetic beauty is indeed reminiscent of Dante's Inferno, which Davis perhaps inevitably alludes to.

The second half is less original and compelling: it traces Wolfe's downfall after Deborah, his hunchbacked cousin who loves him unrequitedly, steals some of Mitchell's money in the hopes that it will allow Wolfe to escape the town; the blame for the theft falls mostly on him, and he commits suicide in prison after realizing that he will never have the opportunity to develop the spiritual powers revealed in his art. This chronicle of doom foreshadows, in its pessimism, the naturalist novels that will dominate the end of the nineteenth century, even if Davis sugars the pill by introducing late in the story a Quaker woman who bears all the values of Christian charity excluded from the mill-town.

Ideologically, the story is somewhat confused, pushed and pulled among Dickensian sentimentalism (shown by the portrayal of the indefatigably loyal Deborah and the Quaker woman, as well as the narrator's persistent Christian allusions); proto-naturalism (as when Davis depicts individual development as wholly determined by environment); and Romanticism (communicated by the korl woman's status as an aesthetic object that has the potential to heal the riven community). This last element is most interesting to me, because it goes beyond what one tends to find in Dickens's or Stowe's ultimately Christian and anti-aesthetic portrayals of "life among the lowly" and unites Davis's story to the concerns of the American Renaissance writers, especially to Hawthorne's fears about the fate of art in Puritan and materialist society (cf. "The Artist of the Beautiful").

Another fascinating element of the story is its nameless narrator, who stages his or her own narration as coming from within the former house of Wolfe, where his korl woman still sits behind a curtain. The narrator essays and exhorts and preaches, sometimes tiresomely, but his or her dense, allusive, poetic prose lifts the story above reportage and gives it a tragic resonance uncommon in realistic short stories:

The road leading to the mills had been quarried from the solid rock, which rose abrupt and bare on one side of the cinder-covered road, while the river, sluggish and black, crept past on the other. The mills for rolling iron are simply immense tent-like roofs, covering acres of ground, open on every side. Beneath these roofs Deborah looked in on a city of fires, that burned hot and fiercely in the night. Fire in every horrible form: pits of flame waving in the wind; liquid metal-flames writhing in tortuous streams through the sand; wide caldrons filled with boiling fire, over which bent ghastly wretches stirring the strange brewing; and through all, crowds of half-clad men, looking like revengeful ghosts in the red light, hurried, throwing masses of glittering fire. It was like a street in Hell. Even Deborah muttered, as she crept through, "looks like t' Devil's place!" It did,—in more ways than one.

This story very much deserves its newfound place in the American canon.

Tillie Olsen's long biographical essay places "Life in the Iron Mills" in the context of Davis's life and times. Olsen has an interesting case to make: that Davis's literary career was thwarted by the domestic responsibilities she took on when she married and had children. This is a more difficult argument than it seems, because Davis was productive, writing fiction and non-fiction until her death and earning a living through her work. She was not "silenced" in the conventional sense. But Olsen argues that none of her subsequent work lived up to her early promise, that in fact "Life in the Iron Mills," written when she was thirty and living with her parents in Wheeling, isolated from literary life and from the social scene, remains her greatest masterpiece. The pressures of domesticity and the consequent need to write potboilers for money combined to warp Davis's gift, so that she never produced the great novels one might have expected from the author of such a brilliant first novella. The contrast is to women writers who did not have children and who either never married or were lucky enough to find supportive spouses: Emily Dickinson, George Eliot, Willa Cather, Virginia Woolf. Olsen's implicit politics are Marxist-feminist, in that freeing up mothers to be great writers would necessarily involve a revolution in the economic and familial order.

Olsen does not do as much textual analysis or intellectual biography as one might wish; I was disappointed to see no discussion at all of Dickens's potential influence on "Life in the Iron Mills," since the story seems almost like a programmatic reply to—and advance upon—the characterization of Stephen Blackpool in Hard Times. I do admire Olsen's lack of special pleading for the bulk of Davis's work, which she admits does not bear re-reading or merit rediscovery:

But Proust is right. There are no excuses in art. Including having been born female in the wrong time/place.

Such a clear assessment of reality, such a forthright admission that poverty and deprivation make people worse and not better, is a great improvement on the dominant Left perspective today, mired as it is in a strange belief that oppression is something like a superpower, granting magical powers of accurate perception to the oppressed that the privileged do not have.

On that note, the most interesting story about Davis's life related by Olsen involves the young author's entry into the literary society of Emerson's New England. As a writer from the Pittsburgh lower middle class (not too far from Wheeling) who has also spent a lot of time negotiating the culture of the intellectual/academic left, I have to say that I identified with Davis in this passage:

Emerson came shortly thereafter. Her tongue was "dry with awe" ("I went to Concord, a young woman from the backwoods, firm in the belief that Emerson was the first of living men"). It loosened, after listening the entire morning, along with Emerson and Hawthorne, to Alcott's "orotund" sentences

paeans to the war, the "armed angel which was wakening the nation to a lofty life unknown before."

I had just come up from the border where I had seen the actual war; the filthy spewings of it; the political jobbery in Union and Confederate camps, the malignant personal hatreds wearing patriotic masks, and glutted by burning homes and outraged women, the chances in it, well improved on both sides, for brutish men to grow more brutish, and for honorable gentlemen to degenerate into thieves and sots. War may be an armed angel with a mission, but she has the personal habits of the slums.

Rebecca found herself tartly, though tremblingly, saying substantially the above.

This would-be seer who was talking of it, and the real seer who listened, knew no more of war as it was, than I had done [as a child] in my cherry tree when I dreamed of bannered legions of crusaders, debouching in the misty fields.

Alcott's orotund sentences went right on, till Hawthorne "rose lazily to his feet, and said quietly: 'We cannot see that thing at so long a range. Let us go to dinner,' and Mr. Alcott suddenly checked the droning flow of his prophecy and quickly led the way to the dining-room."

Her dislike for Alcott, "that vague, would-be prophet," is unconcealed and sometimes vitriolic. She found Emerson's deep respect for him "almost painful to see."

For all Emerson's flattering and receptive attention to her, his "exquisite courtesy," she felt he regarded her not as Rebecca Harding, writer, human being, but as some kind of specimen.

Davis, like Hawthorne, was ambivalent about the Civil War, wishing for an end to slavery even as she recoiled from the carnage and corruption and feared for the future of the nation. Such ambivalence is never welcome; to query the Civil War as a good war at all is to apologize for slavery, they say, just as to question that World War II was an even better good war is to apologize for Nazism, and to oppose the Iraq War was to support Saddam Hussein. And to be sure, he who wills the ends wills the means; but to be glad that slavery and fascism were defeated should not involve denying the disasters of war and should not be used to silence questions about the necessity of war in the present and future, however unavoidable we may judge it to have been in the past. Fiction writers, who have to keep their eyes on details and on individual stories, will inevitably notice the cost of bloodshed in even the most just cause, and will prefer the naming of facts to the recitation of abstractions. But I digress…

Hawthorne, Olsen notes, was the nicest to the young Rebecca Harding of all the New England literati; he has a bad reputation among feminists for his notorious remark about "the damned mob of scribbling women," but he was disparaging commercial fiction when he wrote that. He knew the real thing when saw it, and "Life in the Iron Mills" is certainly the real thing.

[Bibliomama · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very strong and moving story. I read some parts of it aloud because I had trouble focusing at times. Some of the language is quaint or in dialect. But Davis illuminates the horrors and impotence of being trapped in poverty when your whole soul wants to take flight, but can't. She exposes graphically how factory workers are only part of the machinery in the eyes of the owners. A wrencher.

I read most of the biographical chapter by Tillie Olsen, which was quite interesting. Davis was so famous for such a brief brilliant period in the 1860s, but then faded away completely until she was revived by this volume in 1984. I did not read the other two stories included in the book. Maybe later.

[Lana · Rating 3 out of 5]

In cleaning through my apartment I have found an old treasure-trove of book related papers, including my “books read” list from 1999-2000. In addition to listing the books, I wrote about 2-3 sentences to myself – sometimes they were plot reminders, sometimes commentary on the books. They were not intended to be read by anyone other than myself. I don’t imagine these will be very helpful to anyone else, but I’m posting them here for two reasons: first, to keep my reviews/comments in one place now and, second, because they’re kind of a fascinating look at my younger brain.

Displays the atrocities of early industrial life in America. Tragic.

[Geoffrey · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this book in my Writing 1010 class, and my teacher was not the best lecturer on the book. That being said, I did enjoy the story of Life, just not the time we spent in class talking about it. I would have given this book a 5/5 if I had read it on my own, but ya, I didn't.

Anyway, I strongly recommend this book. Rebecca Harding Davis is considered the first author to use realism, and what better way to learn what realism is than by seeing the original definition...?

So all in all, great story, not so great class experience.

[Mia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Depressing, certainly. But the novella that is "Life in the Iron Mills" (it's about 54 pages long in this edition) is beautifully written. The smoke and soot of the town is described so artfully, yellow river and all, that I found myself reading those descriptive passages over again aloud. The working class was shafted big time in the 19th century, and this story captures the horror of it. Read it!

[Christian Schwoerke · Rating 3 out of 5]

A working class woman escapes her class by becoming a writer with the excellent title novella. The other stories are less accomplished but professional, which the introduction explains is the result of having to depend on her pen as the family's means of support.

Well worth reading as access to an era of exploitation that seems distant but which continues to carry echoes into the present.

[Linda Stewart · Rating 5 out of 5]

With the recent mine disasters, this book is worth reading or teaching. How many books imagine or describe the life of iron workers? Reading it well can transform a student's perspective on poverty and oppression.

[Stormy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had to read this for my American Literature class, and it's probably my favorite book I've ever been assigned. Powerful and poignant the entire way through. I loved everything from the heartbreaking story to the way Davis wrote. It's now one of my all-time favorite books.

[Maddy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Life in the Iron Mills is wonderful but the other two stories are weighed down by their happy endings (which Olsen addresses). The biographical interpretation is interesting in concept (as much as art reflecting life reflecting art can be) but was mostly tedious.

[Ellen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ellen I found this difficult to read, but was amazed at the emotional reactions I had to it. Not a book I will forget.

[Janel Atlas · Rating 3 out of 5]

Difficult but beautiful novella about life in industrialized America in 1861.

[JennyB · Rating 3 out of 5]

Back in 1861, when Rebecca Harding Davis published this story in the Atlantic, it was the first time anyone had taken note of and written about the extremely poor. As with many such “firsts,” this hasn’t aged well. The writing is breathless and overwrought, there’s a whole lot of calling out to god, and even more references to the soul’s yearning and striving. It’s a lot, but the story is mercifully short. The moral is not subtle - it punches you in the face hard enough to break your nose. Not much to recommend it, right? But this is one of those nearly forgotten authors and pieces of writing that is frequently cited as being Historically Important, so when I found it for a couple of bucks in a used book store, I grabbed it. (It will be going right back to that same store now that I have finished it.)

Of interest in this particular edition is the “biographical interpretation” written by Tillie Olsen, another historically important and nearly forgotten author in her own right. This is actually longer than the story, and I found it more interesting. Harding Davis led an unusual life, until she got married and led a very usual one. In other words, she became a fairly famous writer around 30, who appeared to be on the dreaded path to spinsterhood - a fate about as appealing as leprosy in the 1800s. But then, she did get married in her 30s, and had a few kids. All of that was not the end of her writing career, but it became something she did for money, around her more important domestic duties, and no longer a means to fulfill her “soul’s striving” for art. Evidently, her later writings give hints that this may not have been the most entirely fulfilling role, despite her own claims that this was woman’s rightful role (no suffragette, she).

There are a couple of other stories in this book, but I don’t intend to read them. Life in the Iron Mills was okay, but a little bit of purple prose-y, ornate moralizing goes a long way.

[Dree · Rating 3 out of 5]

Life in the Iron Mills is considered to be the first American realist fiction, depicting iron workers' lives, presumably near Wheeling, VA/WV, where Davis lived until her marriage. Published in 1861, it looks at an uneducated Welsh immigrant, Wolfe, desperately poor, who spends his limited free time between shifts sculpting out of mill by-products. Though his potential is recognized by a potential investor, nothing will happen with his talent. His potential is wasted because of his inability to get schooling, a mentor, or any kind of job that will permit him more time and materials. This was Davis' first published work, in The Atlantic.

This is a theme in Davis' 3 stories: the other two both feature women who, because of marriage and family, are unable to realize their potential and dreams in the artistic world. She may well have felt this way about her own life. Single and an established writer when she did marry in her early 30s, she then spent years cranking out stories to help support her family. She was unable to take the time to write the serious novel she had planned. These three stories all felt quite choppy to me, and the endings unsatisfying--but the endings I would like would probably not have been publishable at the time she was writing.

In addition to writing the first realist American fiction, Davis also wrote the first story about special interests controlling government; and another about a family who commits a sane relative into an asylum. She was very well known during her time writing, appearing in Atlantic, Peterson's, and many other publications. After her death in 1910 she dropped off the map, and has been redsicovered in the last few decades. This volume is from Feminist Press.

[Madelyn Strauss · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this for my late 19th century American literature class and I thought it was a very interesting read. I thought it had a lot of important things to say about social reform of the time, talking about charity versus reform and how both are good but that it is unlikely that both can be achieved and the importance of one over the other. It also was very interesting the things the novel had to say about what we as humans are forced to do when our circumstances are not good and how the evils we commit are not always our fault and can be a direct result of our attempts to survive. It was really interesting to also see what Davis thought of how working-class women were treated and that they were still seen as incapable even if they were the ones providing for their families. It was also very interesting to see the gender dynamics, especially in regard to Hugh and Deb's difference in sentence for the same exact crime where Deb did it and Hugh was the accomplice. It was also very fitting that Davis ended the novel the way she did. The whole thing with the statue Hugh carved and him killing himself really implemented Davis' theme of every individual having worth despite their position in life. Rich or poor, high society or low, she saw that every individual has worth, but that not every individual got to use their worth for their benefit. Hugh killing himself and the statue remaining as proof of his worth is really symbolic. And then the novella comes full circle with the Quaker woman coming back and supporting Deb after she finished her prison sentence. It shows that charity can really be more beneficial than reform, but that reform is still important for long-term change. It is also really interesting to see this novella in reference to the women workers' protest happening just in the year prior to the publication of this piece. Davis was trying to prove that women workers were just as classy and important as high-class women, but that she wanted to distance herself from some of the actions of women workers.
I did really like Davis's writing and would potentially like to read more from her in the future. The reason this is a three-star is that I did not enjoy the story very well and know that it is not the type of piece to get a four or five star from me.

[SurruhQ · Rating 4 out of 5]

I mentioned this book in my review of The Jungle so I figured I should review it as well.

This is a book I was required to read for an AmLit class in college and I found myself shaken by the content. It's a very sad, dreary book but it is also very beautiful. It chronicles the terror of industrial work and focuses very heavily on the tragedy of being working class during this time period.

Unfortunately, it has been quite some time since I read this one so I am shelving it as a re-read so I may give a better review.

[Francis Bass · Rating 4 out of 5]

worth it mainly for "Life in the Iron Mills." the other two stories are interesting in context, and as a representative of American literature of the time, but not strong in themselves.
Olsen's "Biographical Interpretation" is very detailed and compelling, though a bit more straight biography, less interpretation, than I would have preferred. Still a good read for anyone who wants more context, and Olsen's prose is terrific in its own right. Kelly's foreword in the 2020 edition adds nothing, and Olsen's much much briefer prefatory note from 1985 does the job far better.

[Nancy · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book contains three stories: the titular, Life in the Iron Mills or The Korl Woman; The Wife's Story; and Anne, along with a biographical interpretation by editor, Tillei Olsen. Life in the Iron Mills was originally published in 1861 in the Atlantic Monthly and recovered by Olsen in the 1970's. I was prompted to pick up the book by an event at the library.

All three stories are kind of weird, and difficult to read, but I thought Life in the Iron Mills was the best.

[Drew4gr · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is for life in the iron mills as I haven't read the "other stories." There is a paragraph absent in this edition. Pg 49 after "failed" there is a paragraph about Christ.

[janie · Rating 3 out of 5]

another grad school baddie! not my favorite, but it's fine! solidly neutral

[Sarah Vigue · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked it more the first time I read it. The second time it’s just kind of OK, but it is still an important book because it talks about a time in the past, that I don’t think we should forget.