Beulah - Softcover

Evans, Augusta Jane

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1523775556 ISBN 13: 9781523775552

Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2016

Synopsis

Augusta Jane Wilson, or Augusta Evans Wilson, (May 8, 1835 – May 9, 1909) was an American Southern author and one of the pillars of Southern literature. She was born Augusta Jane Evans on May 8, 1835, in Columbus, Georgia. The area of her birth was then known as Wynnton (now MidTown). As a young girl in 19th-century America she received little in the way of a formal education. However, she became a voracious reader at an early age. Her father, Matthew Evans, suffered bankruptcy and lost the family's Sherwood Hall property in the 1840s. He moved his family of 10 from Georgia to San Antonio, Texas, in 1845. Wilson wrote in the domestic sentimental style of the Victorian Age. Critics have praised the intellectual competence of her female characters, but as her heroes eventually succumb to traditional values, Evans has been described as an antifeminist. Of St. Elmo one critic maintained, "the trouble with the heroine of St. Elmo was that she swallowed an unabridged dictionary." Wilson was the first American woman author to earn over $100,000. This would be a record unsurpassed until Edith Wharton.

About this title

About the Author:

Elizabeth Fox-Genovese is the Eleonore Raoul Professor of the Humanities and director of the Institute for Women's Studies at Emory University. She is the author of many books, including Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South and Feminism and Its Illusions: A Critique of Individualism.

From Publishers Weekly:

Beulah Benton, the protagonist of this reissued novel of the antebellum South, is plucky, feminist, intellectual--but given to convoluted philosophical musings and, ultimately, acquiescent to women's traditional roles. In the formal, sometimes overwrought language of the period, Evans takes the orphaned Beulah from her trouble-ridden childhood through her stormy young womanhood. Despite the many poignant events--including the death of Beulah's young sister and the social ostracism she faces as an orphan--Evans's energetic and direct style achieves sincerity of feeling more often than melodrama. Beulah's lot begins to improve when Guy Hartwell, the doctor who tends her in a serious illness, becomes her guardian. Although she vows to remain unmarried and earn her living as an author and teacher, Beulah ultimately realizes what the reader has known for some time--that Guy is in love with her and she with him. Her transition from independent female to little woman is strained and abrupt, yet, for its time, the novel is remarkable for the seriousness with which it takes women's intellectual pursuits and the dignity it gives to the single life. Fox-Genovese wrote Within the Plantation Household.

Copyright 1992 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 1523775556
• ISBN 13: 9781523775552
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 372