Augusta Jane Evans Wilson

Augusta Jane Evans Wilson (1890)

Augusta Jane Evans (born on 8. May 1835 in Columbus , Georgia as Augusta Jane Evans , died on 9. May 1909 in Mobile , Alabama ) was an American writer.

life and work

Beginnings as a writer

Evans, the daughter of an impoverished land speculator, had an unsteady childhood in Georgia, Texas and eventually Alabama. She began work on her first novel, Inez , which appeared in 1855 when she was only 15 years old. It was not until the second Beulah , a maudlin Schmonzette about the social advancement of a sincere orphan and his path to a true Christian faith, that was in line with contemporary tastes. In the face of the country's ongoing political crisis that led to the outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861 , Evans became an ardent advocate of the interests and ideology of the southern states . In 1860 she even broke her engagement to the New Yorker James Reed Spaulding because of her differences of opinion on the question of secession , after the outbreak of war she became involved in mobilization measures and the care and welfare of the wounded. She also put her third novel, Macaria , entirely at the service of the cause of the southern states. This novel, about the sacrifice of women on the home front, the righteousness of Southern gentlemen, and the loyalty of slaves, proved so effective propaganda that Northern General George Henry Thomas had confiscated copies burned.

St. Elmo

The greatest success of her career came after the war ended; her fourth novel St. Elmo (1866) is probably the best-selling American novel of the 19th century after Harriet Beecher Stowes Uncle Toms Hütte . He found numerous readers in the northern and southern states, but above all women. The influence of the book can be measured by the fact that numerous schools, plantations and even thirteen towns and villages were named after the title of the novel. St. Elmo , on the other hand, tells the story of an orphan who, thanks to her moral stubbornness, ultimately achieves social recognition. The protagonist Edna Earl ends up in the Le Bocage cotton plantation through the rigors of fate . There she steadfastly opposes the advances made by the urbane and sly planter's son, St. Elmo , while reading a comprehensive education and learning several classical languages ​​in order to write a work on comparative research into myths. Ultimately, she succeeds in driving the cynical St. Elmo out of the urge to duel and other nonsense and to raise him to be a righteous and God-fearing man, with whom she then willingly enter into a marriage covenant. St. Elmo is shaped by the clichés and set pieces of "sentimental" women's literature, which dominated the American book market in the 19th century with authors such as Susan Warner , Fanny Fern and EDEN Southworth . In addition to the sugary pathos in Evan's work, there is a seemingly pretentious abundance of references and allusions to motifs from antiquity, the Bible, the history of literature and philosophy, which make many of her sentences appear stilted and often involuntarily funny. The critic JV Ridgely called the novel “an unbelievable concoction of melodrama, pseudo-intellectualism and flower sex, which could well serve as a benchmark for the bad taste of the era” . So there was no lack of parodies: Charles Henry Webb published the parody of St. Twel'mo, or, The Cuneiform Cyclopedist of Chattanooga in 1867 , in which he traced the learned diction of the protagonist Etna Early to the fact that this was an unabridged one in her childhood Dictionary swallowed.

Late years, death and posthumous effects

The success of St. Elmo financially secured Evans, and her livelihood was made all the more prominent when she married the railroad magnate Lorenzo Madison Wilson in 1868. From then on she lived on his magnificent mansion near Mobile, Alabama. By her death, she published five other no less pathetic novels, some of which had the joys of domesticity as their theme, as well as At the Mercy of Tiberius (1887), a detective novel . In 1909 Augusta Jane Evans Wilson died in Mobile.

In the 20th century it was increasingly forgotten, as both the subject and the style of her works appeared increasingly obsolete in view of the emerging realistic prose, but also at least thematically more contemporary trivial literature. It was not until the 1970s that she was rediscovered, like other female novelists, primarily by feminist literary studies. Even if it is visibly difficult to derive emancipatory ideas from Wilson's works, Wilson's enormous success alone has an important role to play in the project led by literary scholars such as Sandra Gilbert , Susan Gubar and Nina Baym , a project written by women " Counter-canon ”to the traditional male-patriarchal dominated literary historiography. Her novels Beulah , Macaria and St. Elmo appeared in print again in 1992 for the first time in decades , but this time under the editorship of university publishers and conceived for use in seminars.

Works

• Inez: A Tale of the Alamo (1855)
• Beulah (1859)
• Macaria; or Altars of Sacrifice (1864)
• St. Elmo (1866)
• Vashti (1869)
• Infelice (1875)
• At the Mercy of Tiberius (1887)
• A Speckled Bird (1902)
• Devota (1907)

literature

• Nina Baym : Women's Novels and Women's Minds: An Unsentimental View of Nineteenth-Century American Women's Fiction. In: Novel 31: 3, 1998.
• Bradley Johnson: Dueling Sentiments: Responses to Patriarchal Violence in Augusta Jane Evans' St Elmo. In: Southern Literary Journal 33: 2, 2001.
• William Perry Fidler: Augusta Evans Wilson, 1835-1909: A Biography . University of Alabama Press, Birmingham 1951.
• Sara Frear: Augusta Jane Evans Wilson . In: Encyclopedia of Alabama . 2013.
• Anna Sophia Roelina Riepma: Fire and Fiction: Augusta Jane Evans in Context. Rodopi, Amsterdam 2000.
• Rebecca Grant Sexton (Ed.): A Southern Woman of Letters: The Correspondence of Augusta Jane Evans Wilson. University of South Carolina Press, Columbia 2002.