Augusta Evans Wilson, 1835-1909

by William Perry Fidler

Overview

A comprehensive biography of Augusta Jane Evans Wilson, one of the nineteenth-century America’s best-selling authors
 
A fascinating biography about Augusta Jane Evans, a nearly forgotten writer who was nevertheless one of the most popular writers of her era. She wrote nine novels about southern women, including St. Elmo, which sold a staggering one million copies within four months of its release in 1866. William Fidler traces the life of Augusta Jane Evans from her birth in 1835 in Columbus, Georgia till her death in Alabama in 1909.
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780817350260
Publisher:	University of Alabama Press
Publication date:	12/17/2002
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	280
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

William P. Fidler was a professor of English at the University of Alabama from 1930 to 1956.

Read an Excerpt

Augusta Evans Wilson 1835â"1909

A Biography

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By William Perry Fidler

UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS

Copyright © 1951 University of Alabama Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8173-5026-0

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CHAPTER 1

PROLOGUE

Mirror of Victorian Tastes

A host of Victorian readers once believed that Augusta Evans Wilson's influence upon American character and manners was so great that her place in literary history was assured. Critics often attacked her nine romances for their erudite style, their moralizing and excessive pathos, but these qualities seemed to heighten the enthusiasm of her loyal followers, who continued to demand that her books be kept in print. This audience must be considerable even in our time, for her novels are constantly re-issued.

In the author's lifetime her constituents wrote hundreds of letters to her, and many of them made pilgrimages to her elegant home in Mobile, to assure her that St. Elmo or Beulah or Macaria had affected them deeply and they were grateful. Apparently they did not miss the realism which critics insisted was absent in her delineations. What they did find in these romances seemed to please them very much: idealized heroines and heroes, luxurious and exotic mansions and gardens, dignified language, brocaded furnishings, eloquent marriage proposals, and stern punishments for the vicious and hypocritical. Her readers were not trained to expect photographic realism. Their tastes would have made them suspicious of mere observation because they believed that the first duty of art, including fiction, is to elevate — to "do good," as they quaintly put it.

Perhaps the strongest appeal of Mrs. Wilson's books is that of "remembrancer," as one critic wrote. Her novels are like mirrors of a better time, are cherished reminders of social traditions and standards of conduct once honored but often forgotten in a later day. Librarians and booksellers say that this appeal is chiefly responsible for her continued vogue.

Augusta Evans Wilson's private life contrasts with her books in certain ways, for she came into contact with many rowdy and sensational events in our country's expansion westward. As a child in the frontier town of Columbus, Georgia, she saw the militia (of which her father was a member) suppress an insurrection of angry Creek Indians who resented encroachments upon their reservations in eastern Alabama. A little later she was a participant in other stages of American "progress": adaptation of the frontier to the traditions of mansion life, enjoyment of the privileges of a slave-holding society, and escape in a covered wagon from the humiliations of bankruptcy. She had a close-up view of the Mexican War while residing in the remote outpost of San Antonio, and later she wrote a quaint little novel about the famous city.

During the cold war of 1850-1859 Augusta's principal interests were non-political, but in the closing years of the national debate she responded to the challenge of yankee abolitionists with a vigorous and persuasive defense of the South. Unsigned articles were written for newspapers and magazines, and after hostilities began she composed such an effective piece of Confederate propaganda, in her novel Macaria, that a Federal general forbade his troops to read it and confiscated available copies. She won a citation from General P. G. T. Beauregard for her services as morale builder and war nurse, and her letters to such influential statesmen as J. L. M. Curry and Benjamin H. Hill prove that her advice in political matters was often sought. Through her activities in support of the South she won the friendship and esteem of such famous Confederates as Toombs, Hilliard and Beauregard, as well as Curry and Hill. At the close of the war she raised funds from among her impoverished friends for the removal of the bodies of fallen Mobilians to Magnolia Cemetery, and later she conducted a drive to finance the erection of a monument to these men. Her zeal for the Confederacy was such that she never used the defeat of her people or the pangs of Reconstruction as subject matter for fiction. To the day of her death she continued to believe that the cause had been sacred.

The height of her reputation came in 1867 with the publication of St. Elmo, a success which ranked after Uncle Tom's Cabin as the most astonishing American literary bonanza up to that time. A year later she made the kind of brilliant marriage which her virtuous heroines usually attained, becoming mistress of stately Ashland, with its matchless grounds, its liveoaks, green-houses and camellias which visitors never forgot. Her unique collection of flowering shrubs, ferns and bulbs was better known locally than her books. For fifty years Mrs. Wilson was certainly the first lady of Mobile, probably of Alabama, and visitors in the old city considered an interview with Miss 'Gusta as the leading attraction of the place. Mobilians still revere her memory, and tourists are always directed to the places associated with her life.

Like Benjamin Franklin's private story, hers is American to the core: rise from poverty to mansion luxury, with a strong implication in the heroine's acceptance of events that virtue, attended by circumspection, must inevitably find its just reward.

The stirring intellectual movements of the last century made a deep impression upon her character. Like most of the earnest thinkers of that "Reflective age," as Emerson boastfully described his time, Augusta Evans Wilson fought the battle of Fundamentalism versus Speculation, and she recorded the progress of her assurances step by step in letters and in Beulah. She knew her Carlyle, Wordsworth and Emerson so thoroughly that she could cite the texts of German Transcendentalism from which they took their arguments. Her correspondence and her books reflect her prodigious reading and constant thoughtfulness on such diverse movements as the Oxford, the Feminist, the Populist, Evolution, and even Spiritualism.

With respect to some of her views, we may call her modern, but this accolade which we self-consciously bestow upon a few Victorians is one that Augusta would not have welcomed without reservations. On most subjects she was a "golden age-ist," a believer in the superiority of the past. She was not so sure, as many of us are today, that tolerance on all points is a virtue. In short, she marched confidently and naturally in the pageant of Victorianism, reflecting its zeal for soul-searching and its love of grandeur, tradition and sentiment.

Mrs. Wilson's peculiar merit as a "domestic sentimentalist" is that her books contain a few attractions which are uncommon in the works of her popular rivals, a group whom Hawthorne once petulantly described as "the damned mob of scribbling women." Even her stilted language, so often condemned and parodied by critics for its affectation, has variety and occasional pungency. She honored the precepts of her age, but she spiced her moralizing with a dash of Byronic gusto. Her best known figure, St. Elmo Murray, is made so fascinating in his sinfulness that "he bowled over a whole generation of romantic schoolgirls." She extended the range of her influence by satisfying her countrymen's hunger for culture, filling her books with commentaries upon philosophy and the arts, upon great writers, musicians and artists. These passages offer refreshment to one who treads his way through this lachrymose fiction which our grandparents read so attentively.

The Victorian tastes which approved these mellow romances need careful analysis, but ridicule is not the proper frame of mind for such criticism. No matter what we may think of these lavendered versions of human nature, the conditions which created them were permeated with sincerity and thoughtfulness, and if we are to understand those times, our mood must be respectful.

Here, then, is the story of a vigorous, zealous woman who mirrored the tastes of the day and influenced her times. Hers was a full life, eventful, helpful and colorful, but her principal achievement was the creation of an odd literary product which millions of our countrymen applauded. Just as ridicule of her books is unsuited to the purposes of this study, so defense of them as works of art is unwise. Rather, let us try to determine why these works happened to satisfy the tastes of people who, in spite of their different fashions and manners, were fundamentally not unlike ourselves.

If these historical perspectives seem inadequate to those who believe that Augusta Evans Wilson's reputation should not be disturbed at this late date, can we not assure these modern folk that another kind of enjoyment may be found in perusing these records? Is it not flattering to see proof of our own superior tastes, to know that we, unlike our forefathers, never mistake an inferior novel for a great one and never allow the pressures of faulty taste around us to confuse our exquisite judgments?

CHAPTER 2

Columbus, Georgia

1828-1845

In the spring of 1828 an English seadog, Captain Basil Hall, journeyed by stagecoach across Georgia to the valley of the Chattahoochee, where he saw a strange but representative example of American pioneering. There on the frontier, in a wilderness acquired only three months before from hesitant Indians, the Captain's party arrived, as he relates, "in the nick of time to see the curious phenomenon of an embryo town — a city as yet without a name, or any existence in law or fact, but crowded with inhabitants, ready to commence their municipal duties at the tap of an auctioneer's hammer." Impressed by this unique method of empire-building, the Englishman recorded every stage of the adventurous enterprise in his Travels in North America.

With the "extinction of the Indian claims" and the removal of the last unwilling Creek to reservations across the river in Alabama, the Georgia legislature undertook the plotting of the new city on a site just opposite the old Indian town of Coweta. A few yards upstream were the shelf-like falls, so valuable as sources of water power, and immediately below the falls was the head of the navigable channel which extended to the Gulf. In planning the future city, the surveyors reserved spaces for wide streets, churches, municipal and county buildings, schools and playgrounds. Advertisements of the sale of lots appeared in the principal newspapers throughout the nation, the Captain states, and "sixty days were considered sufficient to enable adventurers, settlers, land speculators, merchants, and all others so disposed, to come to the spot preparatory to the auction." The project "took like wildfire, and the advantages of the new city being loudly proclaimed over the land, people flocked from all quarters to see and judge of it for themselves." Many of them probably came to witness the excitement, but hundreds of future citizens chose the lots for which they would offer bids, and awaited the great day with impatience, bedding themselves in their wagons or in ramshackle huts, cooking their meals over campfires.

When the sale began on the morning of July 10, 1828, over three thousand eager spectators watched the auction. In less than two weeks 488 lots had been sold, the total receipts being $130,991. Nicholas Howard of Greensboro (an uncle of Augusta Evans Wilson) and Peter Dudley bought the choice lot for $1,855, on the corner of Broad and Crawford Streets, and immediately laid plans to construct a hotel to be named after the newly christened town — Columbus. Before the settlement had legal sanction, the Columbus Enquirer was established by Mirabeau Bonaparte Lamar, who later became a hero of the Texas War of Independence and second President of the new republic.

The building of Columbus was a project that would have warmed the heart of Mark Twain's Colonel Sellers — a giant undertaking, embellished with the wanderlust and risk and glory of American pioneering. There was one young man among the eager prospectors by the name of Mathew Ryan Evans (called "Matt" throughout his life), a dreamer with much of Colonel Sellers' gentleness, charm and instability. But unlike the whimsical Colonel, Matt Evans had a few years of brilliant success. With his brother, Thomas Crenshaw Evans, he left his father's plantation in Edgefield District, South Carolina, and settled in Columbus within the first two years of the city's founding. The two young brothers established the mercantile firm of M. R. Evans & Company, and Matt began to acquire considerable land from the Indians near Oswitchee in Russell County, Alabama.

As profits rolled in from his store and plantation, Matt Evans was enabled to move in the best society of the booming town. One of his close friends was Colonel Seaborn Jones, a prominent civic leader of Columbus, who was to become a Congressman within a few years. The Colonel's daughter, Mary Jones, married Judge H. L. Benning, for whom the army camp was later named. Another intimate friend was John H. Howard, who had moved from Milledgeville before 1830 and immediately demonstrated his confidence in the frontier town by establishing the first cotton mill along the falls of the Chattahoochee. The first meeting of Matt Evans and Sarah Skrine Howard probably occurred at the graceful estate of John H. Howard, called Wildwood, for Sarah often came over from Baldwin County to visit her brother. Early in 1834 Matt became engaged to the modest and brilliant Sarah.

The prospective marriage of Matt Evans and Sarah Howard linked two old Southern families, both of which had been prominent in the affairs of their country. Eminent branches of the Calhoun and Crenshaw families of South Carolina were related to Matt. John Howard of Milledgeville, Sarah's father, had served in the American Army of the Revolution; her paternal grandfather was Nehemiah Howard, a Revolutionary patriarch who condemned the policies of the British army of occupation in South Carolina so boldly that he was sought out by a delegation of prominent Tories and British officers. According to the family genealogist, Nehemiah met the delegation in front of his plantation home at Cross Keys and was immediately attacked by a British officer with a sword, "who commenced slashing and cutting at [Nehemiah's] head as though determined on severing it from his body. With his walking cane he warded off the blows, until the officer ... desisted from his dastardly attack, and while no blood was spilled, the hacks upon the walking cane many years after were shown to his sons, which sent a throb to their bosoms of hate to tyranny, which we hope will descend to the latest of his progeny." Nehemiah's most famous descendant, his great granddaughter Augusta Evans Wilson, inherited a large portion of his pluck and zeal.

Though too crippled to fight in the field, Nehemiah Howard advertised his Patriot sympathies — especially his willingness to let his fifteen-year-old son John serve in the Revolutionary Army — and so infuriated the Loyalists and British of Union District that they set fire to his home three times. After years of unpleasant hostility with reactionary neighbors, Nehemiah sold his property at Cross Keys in 1787 and moved to Elbert County, Georgia, near the juncture of the Savannah River and Lightwood Log Creek. His son John, who came out of the army as a major, settled near Milledgeville and was soon a very wealthy planter.

It would seem that these ancestors of Augusta Evans had won fame enough for one American line, but in later years there were cousins of the novelist who sought to identify this branch of the Howards with the noble family in England, whose daughters had married several members of the royal family. All evidence linking Nehemiah with the English noblemen named Howard is merely conjectural. His kinship with the Howards of Virginia and Maryland is more likely, but authentic evidence is also lacking here. The motto in the coat-of-arms of the English Howards, "Sola virtus invicta," might well have been adopted by Nehemiah and his descendants, particularly Augusta Evans; however, when the modest novelist spoke of the "nobility" of her forbears, she had reference only to their pious and charitable virtues.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Augusta Evans Wilson 1835â"1909 by William Perry Fidler. Copyright © 1951 University of Alabama Press. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents

I. Prologue: Mirror of Victorian Tastes,
II. Columbus, Georgia (1828-1845),
III. San Antonio (1845-1849),
IV. Mobile and Inez (1849-1855),
V. Speculation versus Fundamentalism (1855-1859),
VI. Beulah: a Human Document in an Old Conflict (1859),
VII. A Celebrity (1859-1860),
VIII. Propagandist and War Nurse (1860-1863),
IX. Macaria (1863-1864),
X. Crusader for a Lost Cause (1864-1867),
XI. St. Elmo (1867),
XII. Marriage and Ashland (1868),
XIII. Vashti (1869-1875),
XIV. Infelice and Tiberius (1875-1887),
XV. Last Days (1887-1909),
XVI. Epilogue: Recipe for an Old-fashioned Best Seller,
Notes,
Index,

Editorial Reviews

In lesser hands, this biography would have been either a panegyric or a burlesque. Instead, the author has added an illuminating chapter to the history of popular taste.”
—New York Times
 

From the Publisher