(The first novel by Augusta Jane Evans, the famed American...)
The first novel by Augusta Jane Evans, the famed American Southern author, was written when she was only 15. "Inez: A Tale of the Alamo" is a sentimental, moralistic, anti-Catholic love story that follows an orphan's spiritual journey from religious skepticism to devout faith.
('Beulah,' which brought Evans both critical and commercia...)
'Beulah,' which brought Evans both critical and commercial success, conforms in many ways to the familiar conventions of the nineteenth-century domestic novel. But if the external action of the novel focuses on the typically circumscribed life of a young southern woman, its internal action focuses on a woman's struggles with skepticism and faith. The plot of Beulah follows the uneven fortunes of the orphaned Beulah Benton from her early teens to young adulthood. Beulah's determined quest for independence leads her into the shifting sands of skepticism, doubt, and anxiety.
('Macaria,' the third novel by Columbus native Augusta Jan...)
'Macaria,' the third novel by Columbus native Augusta Jane Evans, was published in April 1864, during the Civil War (1861-65). The book served as propaganda for the Confederate cause and helped to redefine the role of Confederate women during the war. Macaria became a best seller in the Confederacy, with 20,000 copies in circulation by the war's end, and secured Evans's status as a leading female southern writer. Northern generals banned the book for fear of its sympathetic Southern message taking hold among Union troops.
('St. Elmo' is a novel by American author Augusta Jane Eva...)
'St. Elmo' is a novel by American author Augusta Jane Evans published in 1866. Featuring the sexual tension between the protagonist St. Elmo, a cynical man, and the heroine Edna Earl, a beautiful and devout girl, the novel became one of the most popular novels of the 19th century. The novel sold a million copies within four months of its publication.
('Vashti: Or, Until Death Do Us PartAugusta' was written i...)
'Vashti: Or, Until Death Do Us PartAugusta' was written in 1869 by Augusta Jane Evans. J. Evans was a Southern writer in the late 19th century who was instrumental in writing historical fiction that depicted and romanticized life in the South during the 1800s.
('Infelice' was published in 1875. The central theme in 'I...)
'Infelice' was published in 1875. The central theme in 'Infelice' is the right to define one's own identity for a woman, as it became so in Evan's personal life after she married. Her name also bespoke of her family history, which was as much of her identity as was being a Southerner.
('At the Mercy of Tiberius' tells the page-turning story o...)
'At the Mercy of Tiberius' tells the page-turning story of Beryl, accused of murdering her grandfather whom she had just visited and with whom she had a confrontation. All evidence pointed to Beryl who stood to gain if the old general died. His will, which stated that everything he owned was to go to his adopted son, was missing and so everything would go to Beryl's mother.
('A Speckled Bird' by Augusta Jane Evans was published in ...)
'A Speckled Bird' by Augusta Jane Evans was published in 1902. Drawn to the heart of the characters that display great qualities so artfully developed by an author who captures cultural insights that are relevant for today.
Augusta Jane Wilson was an American author. She was one of the most popular American novelists of the nineteenth century and certainly the most successful Alabama writer of her time.
Background
Augusta Jane Evans was born on May 8, 1835, in Columbus, Georgia. She was the eldest of eight children born to Matthew Ryan Evans and Sarah Skrine Howard Evans. Both parents were from planter families, and Evans was a partner in a successful mercantile firm. Augusta and her siblings seemed destined for a life of privilege, but her father's business went bankrupt after the Panic of 1837. Although his family was not impoverished, Matt never regained his earlier level of success. Augusta was permanently marked by the loss of her family's status and wealth. Like many Americans who suffered financial reverses in the economically volatile antebellum years, Matt Evans decided to move west to rebuild his fortune. In the early 1840s, the Evanses lived at Oswichee in Russell County, Alabama. In 1846 they moved to San Antonio, Texas, where business was booming due to the large numbers of settlers who had moved into the area after the Texas War of Independence, and the thriving trade in military goods at the start of the Mexican War. Life on the frontier, however, was rugged and dangerous. In 1849, Matt Evans moved his family back east, this time to the bustling cotton port of Mobile.
Education
Augusta Jane Evans did not receive much schooling because of her family circumstances and frequent illness. Her mother, a well-educated woman, tutored her at home, and she read avidly. She had a keen intellect and developed a great love for philosophy, history, and literature. Evans was deeply attached to her mother and later in life stated that she owed all of her accomplishments to her mother's influence.
Career
Augusta Jane Evans' time in Texas would inspire her first published literary work. In 1850 at the age of 15, she wrote "Inez: A Tale of the Alamo", a sentimental, moralistic, anti-Catholic love story. It told the story of one orphan's spiritual journey from religious skepticism to devout faith. She presented the manuscript to her father as a Christmas gift in 1854. It was published anonymously in 1855.
She wrote her next novel at age 18 which was called 'Beulah.' It was published in 1859. Beulah began the theme of female education in her novels. It sold well selling over 22,000 copies during its first year of publication. This was a staggering accomplishment. It established her as Alabama's first professional author. Her family used the proceeds from her literary success to purchase Georgia Cottage on Springhill Avenue.
When most of the Southern states declared their independence and seceded from the Union into the Confederate States of America, Augusta Evans became a staunch Southern patriot. She became active in the subsequent Civil War as a propagandist. Evans was engaged to a New York journalist named James Reed Spalding. But she broke off the engagement in 1860 because he supported Abraham Lincoln. She nursed sick and wounded Confederate soldiers at Fort Morgan on Mobile Bay. Evans also visited Confederate soldiers at Chickamauga. She also sewed sandbags for the defense of the community, wrote patriotic addresses, and set up a hospital near her residence. The hospital was dubbed Camp Beulah by local admirers in honor of her novel. She also corresponded with general P.G.T. de Beauregard in 1862.
Evans’ propaganda masterpiece was Macaria - a novel she later claimed was written by candlelight while nursing Confederate wounded. The novel is about Southern women making the ultimate sacrifice for the Confederacy; it promoted the national desire for independent national culture and reflected Southern values as they were at that time Macaria is a book with an apocryphal past. The novel was published in 1864 on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line, becoming a popular work among Southerners and Northerners alike. General George Henry Thomas, commander of the Union Army in Tennessee, confiscated copies and had the books burned. What we’ve learned from Melissa Homestead’s painstakingly detailed publication history of Macaria is that the transportation of the novel to New York was deliberate, done in installments and nearly simultaneous with the novel’s preparation for publication in the South. Thus, while previous critics, scholars, and biographers have all treated Macaria's appearance in the North as unauthorized, the truth is much more meaningful. By dispensing with the romantic lie that the novel appeared in a "bootleg" edition, Homestead debunks the hard and fast distinction between Northern and Southern readerships as an invention of historians and critics rather than an accurate reflection of reading practices of the period.
Evans finished her celebrated novel St. Elmo at the home of her aunt, Mary Howard Jones, "El Dorado." In St. Elmo the general setting, if not the specific details, seems to be the Jones', El Dorado. She published St. Elmo in 1866. Within four months it sold a million copies. It featured sexual tension between the protagonist St. Elmo, who was cynical, and the heroine Edna Earl, who was beautiful and devout. So popular was this novel that inspired the naming of towns, hotels, steamboats, and a cigar brand. It was Augusta Evans' most famous novel. St. Elmo was adapted for both the stage and screen. It ranks as one of the most popular novels of the 19th century. The heroine Edna Earl became the namesake of Eudora Welty's heroine (Edna Earle Ponder) in The Ponder Heart published in 1954. The novel also inspired a parody of itself called St. Twel’mo, or the Cuneiform Cyclopedist of Chattanooga (1867).
In 1868 Augusta Jane Evans married Confederate veteran Colonel Lorenzo Madison Wilson becoming Augusta Evans Wilson by which name she is remembered by literary posterity. He was 27 years her senior. Colonel Wilson acquired wealth in banking, railroads, and wholesale groceries. Not far from her home at Georgia Cottage, they settled in a columned house called Ashland in Mobile. The couple attended St. Francis Street Methodist Church. Augusta Evans Wilson became the first lady of Mobile society, supplanting Madame Le Vert who had fallen into social disfavor for having welcomed the Federal occupation of Mobile too warmly. Colonel Wilson died in 1892. Augusta Evans Wilson went on to write five more novels; Vashti, Infelice, At the Mercy of Tiberius, A Speckled Bird, and Devota.
Achievements
Given Augusta's support for the Confederate States of America from the perspective of a Southern patriot, and her literary activities during the American Civil War, she can be deemed as having contributed decisively to the development of the Confederacy in particular, and of the South in general, as a civilization. She was inducted into the Alabama Women's Hall of Fame in 1977.
Her most successful novel, 'St. Elmo' was sold a million copies within four months of its appearance and remained in print well into the twentieth century. Wilson was the first American woman author to earn over $100,000. This would be a record unsurpassed until Edith Wharton.
('St. Elmo' is a novel by American author Augusta Jane Eva...)
1866
Politics
Slavery remained in the background of Evans's novels, but she supported the Confederacy zealously in her life and fiction. She broke off her engagement to New York journalist James Reed Spaulding in 1860 because he supported Abraham Lincoln.
Views
Augusta Jane Evans believed that novelists ought to "elevate" society by presenting their readers with "the very highest, noblest types of human nature." All the heroines and heroes of her novels were or became virtuous Christians who did what they believed was right no matter how much it cost them. Evans Wilson hoped that her characters would inspire her readers to the same kind of heroism.
Quotations:
"Life does not count by years. Some suffer a lifetime in a day, and so grow old between the rising and the setting of the sun."
"If a man's innate self-respect will not save him from habitual, disgusting intoxication, all the female influences in the universe would not avail. Man's will, like woman's, is stronger than the affection, and, once subjugated by vice, all eternal influences will be futile."
"It is a mournful thing to know that you are utterly isolated among millions of human beings; that not a drop of your blood flows in any other veins."
"Memory is earth's retribution for man's sins."
"Money is everything in this world to some people, and more than the next to other poor souls."
"But those who even slightly understand my character must know that I have always been too utterly indifferent to, too unfortunately contemptuous of public opinion, to stoop to any deception in order to conciliate it. Moreover."
Personality
Augusta Jane Evans encouraged younger women to enter the field of nursing, supported a number of Mobile charities, and cultivated flowers with her husband.
Her understanding of her moral duty as an author led her to continue writing romantic novels long after other American writers had adopted the more realistic style that became dominant after the Civil War. Despite her old-fashioned style and conservative views (she rejected the feminist fiction being created by younger women writers such as Kate Chopin and Charlotte Perkins Gilman at the turn of the century), Evans Wilson maintained a loyal readership.
Connections
In 1868 Augusta Evans married Colonel Lorenzo Madison Wilson, a 60-year-old widower, and prosperous businessman. She moved into Wilson's Springhill Avenue mansion, Ashland. The marriage appears to have been happy. Evans Wilson enjoyed her new role as mistress of Ashland and helped to raise her husband's youngest child, Fannie. She had no children of her own.
