Once highly regarded by the general public, particularly girls and women, and disliked intensely by many literary critics, Augusta Jane Evans Wilson's books have not worn well, but they unquestionably represent the domestic novels of the time. Her best-known book, St. Elmo (1867), may well have been the most popular.

Nathaniel Hawthorne bitterly opposed the popular domestic novels. In 1855 he wrote his publisher, "America is now wholly given over to a d--d mob of scribbling women, and I should have no chance of success while the public taste is occupied with their trash--and should be ashamed of myself if I did succeed. What is the mystery of these innumerable editions of [Maria Susanna Cummins's] the 'Lamplighter,' and other books neither better nor worse"--Worse they could not be, and better they need not be, when they sell by the 100,000." The domestic novel, the best-selling literature from 1850 through the...