One of the best-known novelists of the South in the late nineteenth century, Augusta Jane Evans (later Wilson) became little more than a literary footnote in the twentieth. Her most influential novel, St. Elmo (1867), rivaled the most-popular books of the time in sales figures, and readers claimed to have reformed their moral sensibilities as a result of reading the book. The name St. Elmo was bestowed on plantations, towns, children, and even a recipe for punch. Nonetheless, as with most domestic fiction, Evans's novels were eclipsed by the rise of modernism. The didactic, sentimental, and popular emphases of domestic fiction gave way to the cult of the alienated (and usually male) artist. Evans, who was often criticized in her own day, vanished from the literary map. William Perry Fidler, who wrote a biography of Evans in 1951, could not accept her as a serious figure in literary history, observing...