Paperback Edition
ISBN: 9781936932887
Publication Date: 08-18-2020

Edited by Tillie Olsen
Foreword by Kim Kelly

Originally published in 1861 in the Atlantic Monthly, “Life in the Iron Mills” remains a classic of proletarian literature that paints a bleak and incisive portrait of nineteenth-century industrial America. Rebecca Harding Davis was one of the first writers to depict a working class that was exploited and exhausted as capitalism’s mills and factories destroyed both the natural environment and the human spirit.

Davis's work was first recovered in the 1970s by the Feminist Press and writer Tillie Olsen, and then expanded in the 1980s to be the most comprehensive collection of her work to date. This reissued edition includes an updated critical introduction, and shares a uniquely prescient capitalist critique with a new generation.

“A thought-provoking volume for anyone interested in the evolution of women’s fiction.” —Kirkus Reviews

“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.” —National Observer

“An American classic that foreshadowed the naturalist technique of later nineteenth-century writers.” —San Francisco Chronicle