For many years during my writing career, I suffered from guilt whenever I took time off from writing. I needed to be at my typewriter (laptop) pecking away at the keys. What was I accomplishing in a literary sense if I wasn’t? On the other hand, what was I accomplishing by staring at my typewriter paper or my laptop screen all day, struggling after ideas and stories? Nothing, nothing at all.
I’ve since learned that little breaks are great for writers and that they’re not a waste of time. It’s how we recharge and get fresh ideas. Many a day I’ve walked away from my desk, my mental activity exhausted. Whenever I reach this point I know it’s time to do something different. Go for a drive, go for a walk, or take an entire day or weekend off. Get up from your work every ninety minutes or so instead of writing long hours on end. Nothing wrong with doing that, and I recommend it.
Therefore, don’t feel guilty about the times you don’t write. Look at it this way: even when we’re resting, we’re working. Why? Because proper rest contributes to greater productivity and helps us maintain our health.. Our writer’s brains and our bodies will be forever grateful if we take time to rest.
Augusta Jane Evans Wilson was born in Columbus, Georgia in 1835. A devout Christian, she became one of the 19th century’s most popular writers. Though many people today are unfamiliar with her and her work, certain colleges and universities in the United States are rediscovering her.
Her father, Matt Evans, was a businessman and planter. After he lost his fortune in the 1840s he moved his family to frontier Texas. During their journey, Miss Evans’s godly mother, Sarah, educated her and Augusta’s other siblings. Augusta possessed a keen intellect, a huge vocabulary, and a photographic memory. Except for her mother’s tutoring and having attended a formal school for a brief period, she was for the most part self-educated. In Texas, at fifteen years of age, she wrote her first novel—Inez, a Tale of the Alamo.
Unable to cope with the rough and tumble frontier life, Matt brought his family back east and settled in Mobile, Alabama. Here he found a job with a mercantile firm. He and his family lived in a small cottage, called Georgia Cottage, which at the time was on the outskirts of the city. It remains a private residence even today.
After Inez was published in 1855 she wrote her second novel, Beulah. Published in 1859, Beulah became a bestseller.
Augusta was an ardent Confederate, and this devotion led her to write her third book—Macaria; or Altars of Sacrifice. Due to the Union blockade of the South, most of this book was written on wallpaper. After its publication in the South, it was smuggled north to New York and published there as well. It became a bestseller and was so persuasive in defending the South’s cause that George Thomas, a Union general, banned it from his army. An editor friend in New York held the book’s royalties in a trust for her. Thus, after the Civil War, she did not suffer financially like most Southerners at the time did. Macaria was the only bestselling novel written during the Civil War.
In 1868 Augusta married Lorenzo Wilson, a businessman and one of the few wealthy Southerners who also didn’t lose his fortune. He survived financially because he had the foresight to make investments out of the South.
Augusta died in 1909, a well-loved and well-respected citizen of Mobile.
Sources
Evans, Augusta Jane. Macaria; or Altars of Sacrifice, edited with an introduction by Drew Gilpin Faust. Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana University Press, 1992.
Wilson, Augusta Jane Evans. A Southern Woman of Letters: The Correspondence of Augusta Jane Evans Wilson, edited by Rebecca Grant Sexton, Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina, 2002.
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