ABSTRACT
A marked difference exists between the four books written by Augusta Jane Evans and the next four written by Augusta Jane Evans Wilson. The latter reflect two dramatic events in her life: getting married and facing postwar Reconstruction. The fifth book, Vashti (1869), in a canon of nine, is a transitional piece that portrays this trauma in things incomprehensively gone awry, in both internal struggle and struggle with relationships, in resistance to pressures to acquiesce, in despair, and finally in resignation to the inevitabilities of untenable reality. Even as Vashti details the trials and tribulations of two major female characters, its cast includes a community of women whose lives are given the limelight in the novel. Evans started writing Vashti in 1867. Vashti attests that Evans believed that women have a right to safeguard their own identity. Beginning with Vashti, Evans name as a writer would no longer be Augusta Jane Evans, but Augusta Evans Wilson.
