REBECCA HARDING DAVIS: A CONTINUING MISATTRIBUTIONAuthor(s): SHARON M. HARRISSource: Legacy, Vol. 5, No. 1 (Spring 1988), pp. 33-34Published by: University of Nebraska PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25679014 .

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REBECCA HARDING DAVIS: A CONTINUING MISATTRIBUTION

SHARON M. HARRIS University of Washington

With the Feminist Press's 1972 pub

lication of Life in the Iron Mills and Other Stories, scholars have turned with renewed interest to the writings of Re becca Harding Davis (1831-1910), one of America's earliest contributors to the genre of realism. However, a continuing misattri bution to Davis of an ultraconservative tract concerning woman's place in society, Pro Aris et Focis: (A Plea for Our Altars and Hearths), has hindered recognition of her life-long concerns as a literary realist and particularly of her belief that women should pursue meaningful work for self-ful fillment.

In 1975 Philip B. Eppard published an article in Papers of the Bibliographical So

ciety of America, entitled "Rebecca Hard

ing Davis: A Misattribution," in which he

carefully outlined the background of this

bibliographical problem and identified tex tual evidence which precludes the possibil ity of Davis's authorship. Unfortunately, Eppard's article has not been widely avail able and the erroneous attribution has con tinued.1 The original 1870 attribution to Davis grew out of the confusion inherent in

"anonymous" authorial identification in which only previous works identify an au thor. As Eppard has recorded, the New

York publishing firm of Virtue & Yorston

brought out Pro Aris et Focis in June of 1870. The title page acknowledged au

thorship with the notation, "By the Author of 'Waiting for the Verdict,' The History of a Woman's Heart,'

' Anne Sherwood,'

etc." Rebecca Harding Davis had pub lished her well-received novel, Waiting for the Verdict, in 1867; although the other listed works were not hers, she was cited

immediately by highly reputable newspa pers and journals as the author of Pro Aris et Focis.

In part, it was not the fault of American

publishers if they attributed this text to Da vis, since publication notices for the book often omitted any authorial attribution ex

cept "By the Author of Waiting for the Ver dict." Yet several clues should have sig naled their error to publishers when they had the book in hand. As Eppard cites, in addition to the other texts which were not Davis's, this work included a "Preface to American Edition," indicating that the au thor was English. Though Davis had re

peatedly urged her publisher, James T. Fields of Ticknor and Fields, to seek publi cation in England, he never did so; that she had not published abroad would have been readily known in literary circles at the time. More importantly, the style and con tent of Pro Aris et Focis are, as Eppard ob served, "too radical a departure from her earlier writings to make Rebecca Harding Davis a believable candidate for author ship" (Eppard 267). Davis's surest strengths as a writer were her descriptive abilities and her effective use of language; furthermore, she had already published several novels and short stories in the leading journal of the day (The Atlantic Monthly) that de tailed her concern for societal attitudes

33

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34 LEGACY

consigning women to passive and oppres sive roles. All of these attributes were miss

ing from the English text. The true author of Pro Aris et Focis was

Fanny Aikin Kortright (1821-1900), who sometimes published under the pseudo nym, "Berkeley Aikin." An obscure Eng lish novelist Kortright was virtually un known in America in the 1860s; she had

published an autobiography in England in 1863 entitled Waiting for the Verdict.

Though Davis's text by that name was a novel and on a completely different topic (it is an indictment of the pre-Civil War slave system and post-Civil War failures to educate and employ blacks), the dupli cated titles obviously confused publishers. The Independent, a weekly periodical for which Davis would become a regular con tributor in the 1890s, had shed its religious affiliations in the early 1860s and was at the time a secular publication much inter ested in reform, including women's suf

frage. Not surprisingly, therefore, The In

dependent immediately condemned Davis for the conservative views represented in Pro Aris et Focis.

The New-York Daily Tribune, however, had a particular advantage: Davis had been on their staff as an editorial contribu tor since 1869. The Tribune, therefore, im

mediately indicted the attribution to Davis as absurd: "That admirable novelist and

magazine writer had no more to do with

[Pro Aris et Focis ] than she had with the Hindoo Vedas or the books of Confucius; and not wishing to wear unearned honors she desires to have the fact known" (qtd. in

Eppard 266). The Independent published an apology to Davis on July 28, 1870, ad

mitting they had "done a grievous wrong to Mrs. Rebecca Harding Davis, the author of 'Waiting for the Verdict'

" (qtd. in Ep

pard 266).

The continuation of this misattribution has been unfortunate; hopefully, this cor rection will encourage scholars to recon sider Davis's writings after "Life in the Iron

Mills" with renewed interest and with a fresh sense of her opposition to oppression in all forms: slavery, poverty, and the thwarted lives of intelligent, capable women in nineteenth-century America.

Notes

1 Probably most unfortunate was Tillie Olsen's iden

tifying of Pro Aris as a Davis text in her "Biographical Interpretation" which was included in the reissuance of Life in the Iron Mills and Other Stories (Old West

bury, NY: Feminist P, 1985), pp. 137-39. Subse

quent scholars, though they have been concerned with re-establishing Davis's work, have ascribed this text as evidence of Davis's move toward conserva tism: the 1980 edition of the reference guide, Ameri can Writers to 1900, edited by James Vinson; two critical sources published in 1982, Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism, edited by Sharon K. Hall, and American Women Writers: A Critical Reference Guide from Colonial Times to the Present, edited by Lina Mainiero; and the newly published Norton An

thology of Literature by Women (1985), edited by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar. One exception is Judith Fetterley. Though she does not mention the

implications of the misattribution in her introductory comments, Fetterley does include Eppard's article in her bibliographical reference to Davis in Provisions: A Reader from 19th-century American Women (1985).

2The New-York Daily Tribune, 13 July 1870. Quoted in Eppard, p. 266.

Works Cited

Eppard, Philip B. "Rebecca Harding Davis: A

Misattribution." Papers of the Bibliographical

Society of America 69 (1975): 265-67. The Independent 23 June 1870. The New-York Daily Tribune 13 July 1870. Pro Aris et Focis: (A Plea for our Altars and

Hearths). New York: Virtue & Yorston, 1870.

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