Rebecca Harding Davis

by Davis, Rebecca Harding; Lasseter, Janice Milner; Lasseter Milner, Janice; Harris, Sharon M.

• ISBN13: 9780826513540
• ISBN10: 0826513549
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2001-12-01
• Publisher: Vanderbilt Univ Pr

Summary

This is the annotated edition of novelist/journalist Rebecca Harding Davisís 1904 autobiography,Bits of Gossip,and a previously unpublished family history written for her children. The memoirs are not traditional autobiography; rather, they are Davis's perspective on the extraordinary cultural changes that occurred during her lifetime and of the remarkable--and sometimes scandalous--people who shaped the events. She provides intimate portraits of the famous people she knew, including Emerson, Hawthorne, Louisa May Alcott, Ann Stephens, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Horace Greeley. Equally important are Davis's commentaries on the political activists of the Civil War era, from Abraham Lincoln to Booker T. Washington, from the "daughters of the Southland" to Lucretia Mott, from Henry Ward Beecher to William Still.

Author Biography

A nineteenth-century specialist, Janice Milner Lasseter is professor of English at Samford University Sharon M. Harris is the Lorraine Sherley Professor in Literature at Texas Christian University

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	v
Rebecca Blaine Harding Davis: A Chronology	vii
Introduction	1	(22)
PART I. BITS OF GOSSIP
In the Old House	23	(13)
Boston in the Sixties	36	(17)
In the Far South	53	(9)
The Scotch-Irishman	62	(11)
The Civil War	73	(14)
The Shipwrecked Crew	87	(10)
A Peculiar People	97	(16)
Above Their Fellows	113	(18)
PHOTO GALLERY	131	(18)
PART II. FAMILY HISTORY
The Wilson Family	137	(3)
The Leet Family	140	(2)
The Harding Family	142	(7)
Notes	149	(50)
Works Cited	199	(6)
Index	205