Nina Baym-indisputably the expert on American domestic novels-and others have identified paradigms in these novels that would include those used by Evans.1 An orphan, after gaining self-reliance and proving herself of impeccable character, gains the man worthy to be her life partner. The end-all to these female bildungsromans is marriage, according to Baym. However, Evans was “the first author to suggest that a heroine’s destiny need not be a man” (Hofstadter 104), although among the domestic novelists, she would not be alone. Frances Cogan, in her study of the All-American Girl: The Ideal of Real Womanhood in MidNineteenth-Century America, observed that many nineteenth-century women writers did not portray marriage as the “only way for a woman to find meaning in her life” (105). Fanny Fern, who wrote one of these domestic novels, called marriage the “jumping off place,” and satirically offered this advice to new brides:

Another domestic novelist, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, advised “a story teller to close the tale when he comes to a happy day [i.e., wedding]; for, she says, it is not probable another will succeed it.”3