A Southern Woman of Letters: the Correspondence of Augusta Jane Evans Wilson.

Edited by Rebecca Grant Sexton. Women's Diaries and Letters of the South. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, c. 2002. Pp. [xxxviii], 205. $29.95, ISBN 1-57003-440-0.)

Although largely forgotten today, Augusta Evans Wilson (1835-1909) was one of the best-known novelists of the nineteenth century, and her St. Elmo (published in 1866) rivaled Uncle Tom's Cabin in sales. In A Southern Woman of Letters, Rebecca Grant Sexton has collected and edited 112 letters written by Wilson between 1859 and 1906. In her brief but informative introduction, Sexton argues that this correspondence is itself a literary accomplishment, one that complements Wilson's fiction and sheds additional light on her thinking about women's lives, southern society, and political ideology.

Wilson spent her early childhood in Columbus, Georgia, the oldest of six children in a wealthy and prominent family. When Wilson was ten, her father faced bankruptcy after a failed business investment, and the family moved to Mobile, Alabama, which became Wilson's lifelong home. She began writing as a way to bring much-needed income to the family. As Sexton notes, Wilson's fiction fit into the popular nineteenth-century genre of "domestic novels" emphasizing family and romantic dramas (p. xxiii), yet she created heroines with unusual intelligence and independence. She strongly supported women's full access to higher education, including Greek and Latin, and she frequently (and sometimes tediously) used classical references and quotations in both her books and letters. Many letters, including those to her close friend Rachel Lyons Heustis, combine discussion of family matters, her reading and writing, and political opinions, especially her unwavering support for the ideals of the Confederacy, if not for all of its leadership.

Over half of the letters date from the war years. Wilson maintained a correspondence with several Confederate political and military leaders. She frequently wrote to Confederate Congressman J. L. M. Curry of Georgia, offering policy advice. Wilson softened her outspokenness through constant references to her own inadequacy and the impossibility for women to understand matters of state and war. Having established her modesty, she then forcefully articulated her views, including her support for suffrage restriction, dismay with the Exemption Bill, and intense dislike of President Jefferson Davis. Wilson employed a similar mixture of self-deprecation and self-assurance in her discussions of Confederate war strategy with General P. G. T. Beauregard. Her postwar letters describe her interest in writing a history of the war (she wrote to Alexander Stephens and asked him to detail aspects of secret Confederate diplomacy) as well as her efforts to honor the Confederate dead. After her marriage in 1868, the letters become much less frequent, paralleling her loss of productivity as a novelist.

Sexton has thoroughly annotated the letters to identify people, places, and current events discussed by Wilson. As impressive as Sexton's research is her ability to decipher Wilson's crosshatch handwriting. A Southern Woman of Letters is, in short, a fascinating introduction to one of the South's most intriguing nineteenth-century women.

SARAH CASE

Santa Barbara, California