Despite Wheeling's productivity and its accessible location along the Ohio River, Davis described the world of her childhood as having belonged to a slower, simpler time, writing in her 1904 autobiography Bits of Gossip that, "there were no railways in it, no automobiles or trolleys, no telegraphs, no sky-scraping houses.

[4] While being home-schooled, Rebecca read such authors as Harriet Beecher Stowe, sisters Anna and Susan Warner, and Maria Cummins, which initiated her interest in literature.

Rebecca described the school as "enough math to do accounts, enough astronomy to point out constellations, a little music and drawing, and French, history, literature at discretion".

[4] 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.

[4] Upon returning to her industrial hometown, Wheeling, Rebecca Harding Davis socialized very little, staying largely within her own family circle.

[4] Life in the Iron Mills, published in The Atlantic Monthly in April 1861, is regarded by many critics as a pioneering document marking the beginning of realism in American literature.

[7] She later met and became acquainted with Emerson whilst staying with Nathaniel Hawthorne during a trip she had long delayed to meet her publisher James T. Fields.

[4] On her journey back from a meeting with her publisher, Rebecca met L. Clarke Davis in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, whom she had been corresponding with since he had contacted her as an admirer of her work after the publication of "Life in the Iron-Mills."

In April 2013, a historical marker in Davis's honor was placed near Swanson Science Center, the site of the former McIlvaine Hall/Washington Female Seminary.

[9] The effort to place the marker there was led by Jennifer Harding, a Washington & Jefferson College English professor, who has no biological relationship to the author.

[10] A thorough biography titled Rebecca Harding Davis: A Life Among Writers by Sharon M. Harris (Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2018) (ISBN 978-1-946684-30-1) appeared after biographical writing by Jane Atteridge Rose and Jean Pfaelzer.

Both its form and content were ground breaking at the time of its publication, being a narrative that follows the lives of laborers and the consequences of industrialization, in a traditionally realistic style.

It is described as a polluted and oppressive village, inhabited by laborers, mostly "masses of men, with dull, besotted faces bent to the ground, sharpened here and there by pain or cunning; skin and muscle and flesh begrimed with smoke and ashes".

[11] The short story's protagonist is Hugh Wolfe, an iron mill laborer who possesses artistic talent and a spiritual desire for higher forms of pleasure and fulfillment.

And it uses a realistic style with journalistic specificity and characters typical of their social class and speaking in its vernacular, comparable to that of writers in the height of American literary realism, which came two decades after the text was published.

[17] Davis's depiction of the daily routines of the laboring class is a common theme throughout her writing, and most importantly serves the purpose of unveiling the maltreatment of such individuals.

The intensity with which this figure is received, and the humanistic quality of its structure relay a message intended to reveal the true image of not only laborers, but female beauty as well.

Thus, Davis utilizes the Korl Woman to depict the realistic effects of the iron mills, while simultaneously questioning female societal restrictions as a whole.