Macaria: Or, Altars of Sacrifice

By Augusta Jane Evans

Book Overview

First published in 1864, Macaria; or, Altars of Sacrifice was the third novel of Augusta Jane Evans, one of the leading women writers of nineteenth-century domestic fiction. A wartime best-seller, whith more than twenty thousand copies in circulation in the print-starved Confederacy before the war's end, the novel was also extremely well received along the Union front, so much so that some northern officials thought it should be banned. Long out of print and largely unavailable until now, Macaria is a compelling narrative about women and war. In Macaria, Evans charts the journey of two southern women toward ultimate self-realization through their service in the war-torn Confederacy. discarding the theme of romantic fulfillment, Evans skillfully crafts a novel about women compelled by the departure and death of so many southern men to find meaning in their own "single blessedness," rather than in marriage. Drew Gilpin Faust, in her perceptive introduction to this edition, places the novel in the context of the concerns of Confederate nationalism and the contributions of women during the Civil War. She provides an ideological and historical framework within which to interpret the novel and introduce it to a new generation of readers. Largely overlooked in the current revival of women's fiction, Augusta Jane Evans is less well known today than she should be. The reissue of this volume will do much to garner Evans a well-deserved place in the existing body of American literature, and especially southern and women's literature.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0807116629
• ISBN13: 9780807116623
• Release Date: August 1992
• Publisher: LSU Press
• Length: 448 Pages
• Weight: 1.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 6.1" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Valueable Example of Confederate Propaganda

When I discovered Drew Gilpin Faust's edition of Augusta evans's novel, _Macaria; or Altars of Sacrifice_ while working on a college research paper, I was excited to find an example of the writing of a woman I had read brief mentions of in various books and an example of fiction published in the South during the Civil War. Although Evans's writing is flawed, as was pointed out even during her lifetime, when writing was often more flowery, by occasional digressions to show off Evans's learning--as when one of the duel heroines has been observing the stars through her telescope and muses on astronomical history--Evans's story is compelling and valueable. The story concerns two heroines living in Mobile, where Evans lived by this time: Irene Huntingdon, who has been raised in luxury but seeks to be strong and to find meaning in her life instead of simply spending her time and her father's wealth on fashion and shallow socializing, and Irene's poorer, artistic friend, Electra Grey, with whom Irene remains friends despite both a longstanding grudge that Irene's father holds against Electra's family and Irene and Electra's enduring love for the same man. Faust explains in the introduction that a Union general banned his soldiers' reading of _Macaria_, which had been republished by her antebellum New York publisher soon after its publication; while Evans's southern characters often showed too much materialism, snobbery, and insensitivity to make the South seem like an unquestionably superior region, her refusal to write as if she accepted the by then explicit northern view of slavery as a centrally important issue in the war and her portrayal of her central characters' personal growth do give strong signs of why the general who banned it might have worried that it would weaken some people's commitment to restore the union and to accept the view of the war, promoted by the time of its publication, as a fight against slavery. A final reason for _Macaria_'s value is its resolution of the question of women's role in the South, regardless of class, at least as viewed in the emergency period of the civil War; _Macaria_ does not end with the usual conventions of nineteenth-century domestic novels, and Faust's introduction provides some mixed contemporary southern reactions to the way in which Evans chose to end her heroines' story.