Waiting for the Verdict

by Rebecca Harding Davis

Book by Davis, Rebecca

Genres: Classics

Paperback

First published January 1, 1867

About the author

Rebecca Blaine Harding Davis (born Rebecca Blaine Harding) was an American author and journalist. She is deemed a pioneer of literary realism in American literature. She graduated valedictorian from Washington Female Seminary in Pennsylvania. Her most important literary work is the novella Life in the Iron Mills, published in the April 1861 edition of the Atlantic Monthly which quickly made her an established female writer. Throughout her lifetime, Davis sought to effect social change for blacks, women, Native Americans, immigrants, and the working class, by intentionally writing about the plight of these marginalized groups in the 19th century.

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Nanette · Rating 4 out of 5]

Remarkable C-19 epic drama of two families, black & white, South and North, rich and poor, over the course of the US Civil War. Questions of atavism, classism, miscegenation, honesty, love, and forgiveness populate this historic novel. It’s a moving polemic for Reconstruction and white responsibility toward emancipated Blacks. It predates Gone With the Wind by nearly a century! but is, in comparison, full of richly drawn and respectable characters with their flaws and virtues, Black and white. This is not a pining for a lost romanticized antebellum America, but rather a critique of the systemic racism that led to that war between brothers and a plea for reconstruction of not only the nation, but the human heart. Mankind’s propensity for greed, prejudice, pride and revenge are not glossed but function within a rhetoric of self-respect, social responsibility, repentance and forgiveness. Davis’s ability to write dialect is remarkable. This is a suspenseful love story to the end—familial love as well as romantic love, love of country and place, too.

Davis wrote from the frontlines of the Civil War where she lived in Wheeling, West Virginia, along the Ohio River—a literal and figurative boundary between slave and free states. Aside from some annoying vernacular and idioms of the era, this was a really good book. This is regarded as her best novel. (She wrote over 63 books during her 40 yr career as a popular author.) It’s one of those forgotten books that should IMO be revived. The title of the book is salient today as our country still awaits the verdict on how we will respond to a legacy of racism.