Rebecca Harding Davis was a prominent author of radical social fiction during latter half of nineteenth century. In stories that combine realism with sentimentalism, Davis confronted a wide range of contemporary American issues, giving voice to working women, slaves, freedmen, fishermen, prostitutes, wives seeking divorce, celibate utopians, and female authors. Moreover, in her stunning blend of sentiment, gritty detail, and vernacular fiction, Davis broke down distinctions between private and public worlds, distinctions that trapped women in ideology of domesticity. In first study to consider Davis as a literary activist, Jean Pfaelzer describes how Davis fulfilled her own charge to women authors to write the inner life and history of their time with a power which shall make that time alive for future ages. By engaging current strategies in literary hermeneutics with a strong sense of historical radicalism in Gilded Age, Pfaelzer reads Davis through public issues that this major nineteenth-century writer forcefully inscribes in her fiction. In Pfaelzer's study, Davis's realistic narratives actively construct a coherent social work, not in a fictional vacuum but in direct engagement with explosive movements of social change from Civil War through turn of century.