Rebecca Harding Davis was a prominent author of radical social fiction during the latter half of the nineteenth century. She confronted a wide range of contemporary American issues, giving voice to working women, prostitutes, wives seeking divorce, celibate utopians, and female authors. By engaging current strategies in literary hermeneutics with a strong sense of historical radicalism in the Gilded Age, Jean Pfaelzer reads Davis through the public issues that she forcefully inscribed in her fiction.
