Rebecca Blaine Harding was born in Washington, Pennsylvania, on June 24, 1831,[1] to Richard and Rachel Leet Wilson Harding. After an unsuccessful entrepreneurial spell in Big Spring, Alabama, the family finally settled in Wheeling, West Virginia, in 1836. Wheeling's rapid transformation into a factory town in the first half of the nineteenth century profoundly affected the themes and the vision of Davis's later fiction.
When she was 14, she was sent back to Washington, Pennsylvania, to attend the Washington Female Seminary, from where she graduated as class valedictorian in 1848. After returning to Wheeling, she joined the staff of the local newspaper, the Intelligencer, submitting reviews, stories, poems, and editorials, and also serving briefly as an editor in 1859.
Life in the Iron Mills, published in the Atlantic Monthly in April 1861, is regarded by many critics as a pioneering document marking the transition from Romanticism to Realism in American literature. The successful publication of the short story also provided her with acclaim in the literary circles of her time.
On her journey back from a meeting with her publisher, James Thomas Fields, Rebecca met L. Clarke Davis in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, whom she married on March 5, 1863. The following year she gave birth to their first son, Richard Harding Davis, who was to become a writer and journalist himself. Their second son, Charles Belmont, was born in 1866; their daughter, Nora, in 1872.
From 1869 onwards, Rebecca Harding Davis was a regular contributing editor to the New York Tribune and the New York Independent. In 1889, however, she resigned from the Tribune in order to protest editorial censorship of her articles.
On September 29, 1910, Rebecca Harding Davis died of a stroke at her son Richard's house in Mt. Kisco, New York.
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