The Censored and Uncensored Literary Lives of Life in the Iron-Mills

Abstract

Rebecca Blaine Harding (not yet Davis) must have been a bit dismayed when she read her first published story, Life in the Iron-Mills, 1 in its April 1861Atlantic Monthly form. An entire paragraph had been excised from the manuscript (holograph) she had submitted in 1860. 2 When in 1972 Tillie Olsen reprinted Life in the Iron-Mills, she naturally used the Atlantic Monthly text, since she found it "in one of three water-stained, coverless volumes of bound Atlantic Monthly s... in an Omaha junkshop" (157). Ticknor and Fields published a new version of the story in an 1865 collection of fiction from the Atlantic Monthly. 3 Olsen's reprint and Cecelia Tichi's 1997 edition were both based on the Atlantic 's version of the story. Neither Olsen nor Tichi indicate awareness of the 1865 text. This 1865 version restores the substance of the holograph paragraph in two paragraphs, rather than one. The holograph and the 1865 texts contain Davis's full artistic vision, though the holograph is the superior text. It offers internal coherence to the story and is stylistically superior—more poetic, more technically accurate, and less effusive and declamatory—than the 1865 version of the story which, nonetheless, surpasses the Atlantic Monthly text.