page_title: Augusta Jane Evans
section_title: Death and legacy
hierarchical_section_title: Augusta Jane Evans / Death and legacy
caption_attribution_description: English: Augusta Jane Evans
context_page_description: Augusta Jane Evans, or Augusta Evans Wilson, was an American author of Southern literature and a patriot of the South. She was the first woman to earn US$100,000 through her writing.
  Wilson was a native of Columbus, Georgia, and her first book, Inez, a Tale of the Alamo, was written when she was still young. It was published by Harpers, but met with indifferent success. Her second book, Beulah, was issued in 1859 and became at once popular, still selling well when the American Civil War broke out. Cut off from the world of publishers, and intensely concerned for the cause of secession, she wrote nothing more until several years later when she published her third story, Macaria, dedicated to the soldiers of the Southern Army. This book was burned by some protesters. After the war closed, Wilson travelled to New York with the copy of St. Elmo, which was speedily published and met with great success. Her later works, Vashti; Infelice; and At the Mercy of Tiberius had phenomenal success. In 1868, she married Lorenzo Madison Wilson, of Alabama, and they resided at Spring Hill.
context_section_description: Wilson had become wealthy through her marriage and her literary earnings and retired from writing during her final years. She died of a heart attack in Mobile on May 9, 1909, and is buried in Mobile's Magnolia Cemetery. Her beloved Ashland burned to the ground in 1926. However, Georgia Cottage is still standing with a historical marker on Springhill Avenue designating it as her home.
  Given her 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 literary and cultural development of the Confederacy in particular, and of the South in general. She was inducted into the Alabama Women's Hall of Fame in 1977  and was one of twelve inaugural inductees to the Alabama Writers Hall of Fame on June 8, 2015.
  A film and website on Wilson entitled The Passion of Miss Augusta was produced by Alabama filmmaker Robert Clem (2016), the 150th anniversary of the publication of St. Elmo.  The film combines documentary interviews and dramatized scenes from St. Elmo as a silent film and a 1950s film showing how its story might have been told at a time when Eudora Welty, William Faulkner and Tennessee Williams were the face of Southern fiction. Interviews from the film as well as photographs and other exhibits have been collected in an online 'museum' on Wilson and her career. Brenda Ayres write the biography, The Life and Works of Augusta Jane Evans Wilson, 1835–1909 (2016).
caption: Mrs. August Evans Wilson (1894)
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