After the war closed, Wilson travelled to New York with the copy of St. Elmo, which was published and met with great success.

[7] In 1850, at the age of fifteen, she wrote Inez: A Tale of the Alamo, a sentimental, moralistic, and anti-Catholic love story.

Her brothers had joined the 3rd Alabama Regiment and, when she traveled to visit them in Virginia, her party was fired upon by Union soldiers from Fort Monroe.

And my fingers fairly itched to touch off a red-hot-ball in answer to their chivalric civilities", she wrote to a friend.

She sewed sandbags for the defense of the community, wrote patriotic addresses, and set up a hospital near her residence.

Some portions of the manuscript were scribbled in pencil while sitting up with the sick soldiers in "Camp Beulah" near Mobile.

A Federal officer in Kentucky seized and burned every copy of the Confederate edition of Macaria which he could find.

[7] General George Henry Thomas, commander of the Union Army in Tennessee, confiscated copies and had the books burned.

[citation needed] After the Civil War ended, Evans went to New York to take the manuscript of her most ambitious effort, St. Elmo (1866).

In 1878, the home was purchased by Captain and Mrs. James J. Slade who changed its name to St. Elmo in honor of the novel which it had inspired.

It featured sexual tension between the protagonist St. Elmo, who was cynical, and the heroine Edna Earl, who was beautiful and devout.

The "high flown" language in which it was written, and the rare literary attainments of the little barefoot heroine drew forth severe criticism, and some one even ventured on a parody, "St. Twelvemo"; but all this could not affect the popularity of the book.

Because of her delicate health, Lorenzo objected seriously to her writing, and at his request, she discontinued it and devoted herself to decorating her home and grounds.

Critics have praised the intellectual competence of her female characters, but as her heroes eventually succumb to traditional values, Wilson has been described as an antifeminist.

Thus, while previous critics, scholars and biographers have all treated Macaria’s appearance in the North as unauthorized, the truth is much more meaningful.

Some scholars say that by dispensing with the romantic notion that the novel appeared in a "bootleg" edition, Homestead debunks the hard and fast distinction between Northern and Southern readerships as an invention of historians and critics rather than an accurate reflection of reading practices of the period.

The novel also inspired a parody of itself called St. Twel'mo, or the Cuneiform Cyclopedist of Chattanooga (1867) by Charles Henry Webb.

[12] One reviewer wrote:[11] The beauty and purity of Christian truth she coins from the crucible in which her mystic alchemy is cast.

She never wavers in the sacred faith of a pure and true religion.Her books were banned by the American Library Association in 1881: "by reason of sensation or immoral qualities".

[15] A film and website on Wilson entitled The Passion of Miss Augusta[16] was produced by Alabama filmmaker Robert Clem in 2016, the 150th anniversary of the publication of St. Elmo.

[17] Brenda Ayres wrote the biography, The Life and Works of Augusta Jane Evans Wilson, 1835–1909 (2016).