Parlor Radical

Rebecca Harding Davis is best remembered for her 1861 story 'Life in the Iron Mills.' Her image of the korl woman, the sculpted figure who symbolized the plight of mill workers in the industrializing United States, still haunts us. . . . Parlor Radical is a substantive work that contextualizes Davis's writings in provocative ways.

Jean Pfaelzer's Parlor Radical documents Davis's literary engagement with virtually every social and political issue of the second half of the nineteenth century, including temperance, racism and Reconstruction, women's suffrage, and 'New Womanhood.' . . . Readers who know Davis only as the author of 'Life in the Iron Mills' will find here a literary career as rich as that of any nineteenth-century writer, male or female, and a persuasive argument that American social realism was always in dialogue with forms, such as sentimentalism, to which it has usually been opposed.

This present volume provides an extended commentary of impressive critical sophistication and historical insight, . . . furnishing the modern reader with one of the most valuable guides available to the life and work of an author who urged her contemporaries to write 'the inner life and history of their time with a power which shall make that time alive for future ages,' a challenge she proved herself worthy of in her stories.