"You My Brother Will Be Glad with Me": The Letters of Augusta Jane Evans to Walter Clopton Harriss, January 29, 1856, to October 29, 185[8?]

WHEN AUGUSTA JANE EVANS WILSON DIED IN 1908, she was a highly popular novelist, author of the acclaimed Beulah (1859) and St. Elmo (1866), and one of the wealthiest and most prominent citizens of Mobile, Alabama.1 According to her biographer, William Perry Fidler, her funeral was the largest seen in the city of Mobile up to that time.2 In 1856, however, the twenty-one-year-old Augusta was practically an unknown. She had published one novel which had sold poorly, and she was just emerging from a personal religious crisis that had brought her to the brink of despair. During this struggle, Evans corresponded with a young Methodist minister, Walter Clopton Harriss (1830–66), who played an important role in her eventual return to the Methodist faith in which she had been raised. In his chapter on Evans’s religious crisis, Fidler quotes extensively from four letters the novelist wrote to Harriss which describe her exSara Frear is a graduate student at Auburn University and is currently completing her dissertation comparing the religious thought of domestic novelists Augusta Jane Evans Wilson and Marion Harland [Mary Virginia Terhune]. She would like to extend warm thanks to Grace Jones Middleton of Fort Walton Beach, and Mary Ann Pickard, archivist at the Methodist Archives Center at Huntingdon College. Their generosity, close cooperation, and careful attention to detail made this article possible. She would also like to thank the anonymous readers of The Alabama Review for their helpful suggestions and improvements to the introduction and especially the annotations of the Evans letters. 1 In 1868 Evans (1835–1909) married Lorenzo Madison Wilson of Mobile. Her works published prior to her marriage appeared under various forms of her maiden name. After her marriage, her writings were published under various forms of her maiden and married names, including Augusta Evans-Wilson, Augusta J. Evans, and Augusta Evans Wilson (Augusta J. Evans). In modern reference works and scholarship, her name usually appears as Augusta Jane Evans and Augusta Evans Wilson. 2 William Perry Fidler, Augusta Evans Wilson, 1835–1909: A Biography (Tuscaloosa, 1951), 214. Notes and Documents S A R A S . F R E A R “YOU MY BROTHER WILL BE GLAD WITH ME”: THE LETTERS OF AUGUSTA JANE EVANS TO WALTER CLOPTON HARRISS, JANUARY 29, 1856, TO OCTOBER 29, 185[8?] T H E A L A B A M A R E V I E W 112 haustion, her decision to trust in Christian revelation, her lingering doubts, and finally her return to the church and determination to “combat skepticism until the day of my death.”3 These letters, which for a time were believed lost, are still in the private possession of a Harriss descendent.4 In addition, typed transcripts dating from 1961 are available at the Methodist Archives Center at Huntingdon College Library, Montgomery, Alabama. The center also holds papers by and about Harriss, as well as the records of the St. Francis Street Methodist Church in Mobile, of which Evans was a member. A study of the surviving Evans-Harriss letters does not dramatically alter the account provided by Fidler in 1951. It does, however, shed more light on Evans’s religious experience and reveal aspects of her thought that Fidler did not explore. Together with the Harriss papers, the documents also raise intriguing questions about Evans’s relationship with her beloved friend and mentor, and the role he played in her conversion. Both Evans and Harriss may be seen as part a growing trend toward intellectualism in Methodism in the mid- to late-1800s. Both struggled with the tension between faith and reason, and in the end they arrived at different conclusions. Evans’s religious crisis probably had its origins in her extensive reading of the philosophers, poets, historians, and scientists who were considered the most prominent intellects of her day. She was, in addition , fascinated by classical history and mythology and concerned about the competing claims to revelation made by different religions. Philosophers, particularly European and American transcendentalists , and romantic poets made a deep impression on the budding author . A voracious student with a keen memory, Evans devoured works by philosophers like Locke, Spinoza, Hume, and Feuerbach...