Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
Augusta Jane Evans Wilson was an influential American novelist born on May 8, 1835, in Columbus, Georgia. As the eldest of eight children, she received a largely home-based education from her mother, which nurtured her passion for literature and writing. Moving to Texas as a child, Wilson developed strong pro-Southern beliefs, including a conviction regarding the moral righteousness of slavery. She began her writing career at a young age, producing complex works that often challenged societal norms, particularly concerning women’s roles, faith, and the intersection of religion and science.
Her debut novel, *Inez: A Tale of the Alamo*, showcased her narrative style, while her later works, such as *Beulah* and *St. Elmo*, engaged with deeper moral and existential questions. *St. Elmo*, her most successful novel, adhered to the domestic novel tradition, focusing on themes of love and reform. Despite her literary success, including popular later works, Wilson maintained traditional views on women’s roles, remaining opposed to women's suffrage throughout her life. She passed away on May 9, 1909, leaving behind a complex legacy as a prominent Southern female author of her time.
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Subject Terms
Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
Author
- Born: May 8, 1835
- Birthplace: Columbus, Georgia
- Died: May 9, 1909
- Place of death: Mobile, Alabama
Biography
Augusta Jane Evans Wilson was born on May 8, 1835, in Columbus, Georgia, the eldest of eight children, and she was educated almost entirely at home by her mother, Sarah Skrine Howard Evans. While she was young her father, Matthew Ryan Evans, moved the family to Texas. In both Georgia and Texas, Wilson developed a deep love and loyalty for the South, including a firm conviction that slavery was not only morally right but integral to what she regarded as the inherent superiority of the Southern way of life over that of any other region. Her early education had fostered in her a deep and abiding love of the written word, and she began writing while relatively young.
Wilson’s writing, however, is often difficult for the modern reader to appreciate, since it is convoluted both in plot and sentence structure. Often, she seems to have enjoyed employing her immense and learned range of vocabulary simply to show it off to readers, or to force her intended audience of young girls to expand their own vocabularies by looking up unfamiliar words in the dictionary. However, she also was unafraid to address in her writing the questions that many women of her time were daring to ask, including questions about religion and its relation to science, particularly Darwinism, as well as questions about the place of love, marriage, and responsibility in a rapidly changing society.
Her first novel, Inez: A Tale of the Alamo, was written as a present to her father and features a virulently anti- Catholic plot about a villainous Jesuit priest. However, her friends liked it enough to encourage her to continue writing, and she produced Beulah in 1859, the first of the novels in which she began to address the difficult questions of her day. In Beulah, the protagonist suffers a major crisis of faith and is nearly driven to abandon the Christian religion as a result of her extensive secular reading, but in the end she discovers that faith is more powerful than any amount of doubt. Wilson’s third novel, Macaria: Or, Altars of Sacrifice, was published during the Civil War and was dedicated to the Confederate soldiers. This blatant manifesto for the Southern cause was bound in crude boards as the result of wartime privations and was condemned as dangerous propaganda by a Union general, George Henry Thomas. Her fourth and best-selling novel, St. Elmo, was published after the Civil War and is an almost perfect example of the domestic novel. The novel’s plot is entirely about the reform of a former rake by a woman’s love, and once the man is reformed, the woman abandons all of her independence, including her writing, to be a devoted wife.
However, the author herself continued to write after her 1868 marriage to Lorenzo Madison Wilson, a wealthy businessman in Mobile, Alabama. Although her later novels sold well, none of them added any further to her established reputation. She died on May 9, 1909, still opposed to women’s suffrage on the grounds that a woman’s place is in the home and she should not sully herself with the ugliness of politics.