Customer Reviews

Life in the Iron Mills and Other Stories: Second Edition

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I read Life in the Iron Mills for a graduate English course on social-class-imagery in 18th & 19th cen Transatlantic (British and American) literature with Elisabeth Ceppi at Portland State. Ceppi asked us to read closely for the rhetoric of class attributes. There was much class-identifying-imagery to observe in Harding-Davis' 1860's rendering of the lives of impoverished Welsh miners transported into late-slave-era iron foundries of the American North. Mid-19th-cen feminist literature of this social-reform type is deeply informed by Protestant missionary enthusiasm to transform everyone into clean-living bourgeois church-goers. Thus Harding-Davis uses powerful polarities of dirt for workers, clean for bouregoisie, etc. It's so blunt and obvious that she could be accused of writing soap-opera ... as many of her mid-1800's female-writer colleagues were accused, sometimes justly. However her scenes of poverty, disease, and death in the mills are so heart-wrenching that her motives are clearly pure. Now that Tillie Olsen has rescued Harding-Davis' wonderful writing from obscurity, she is good to read for knowledge of American feminist writing history, for understanding of American class polarities in the ante-bellum era, and also for a true, scary story of life with the great unwashed.

I ordered this book for an environmental literature class, and have only read "Life in the Iron Mills." The short story was quite depressing, but very good. It left me thinking about it for days after I finished it. This is one of the best stories I have ever read. I loved that this story sends a message that even in the most grimy surroundings one can find beauty. A great read.

Thank you so much!!
the item that i ordered has come in a really nice condition
that i expected.
thanks again.