Evelyn's Husband is a novel published by the University of Mississippi in 2005 from an unpublished manuscript by African American author Charles W. Chesnutt which was edited by Matthew Wilson and Marjan Van Schaik.

[1] In addition to being an author, Chesnutt was an educator, lawyer and political activist who was involved in the early works of the NAACP.

Evelyn's Husband is the African American author Charles W. Chesnutt's attempt at portraying white life in Boston in the early 1900s.

The book examines the role of fate on the lives of two men, one older and one younger, in their pursuit of the same woman.

The novel Evelyn's Husband revolves around four major characters, placing them in extraordinary situations under the power of coincidental fate in order to examine human nature, morality, and love.

This book starts in the Thayer household, where Edward Cushing waits to take Alice and Evelyn to an opera.

At the opera, Evelyn becomes the center of attention for many young men, including Hugh Manson and William Rice.

Manson cannot take his eyes off Evelyn, and invites the ladies to his office to review plans for Rice's new house.

Manson spends the entire day periodically checking the art gallery, and subsequently runs into the two women.

Evelyn, after hearing the truth, accepts her duty to marry Cushing, and writes a letter to Manson to terminate their love affair.

Moving past this, she helps make arrangements for the wedding, and hides letters mailed to Evelyn from Manson proclaiming his love.

The book's next chapter reviews their first year of marriage, detailing Cushing's new cynical and skeptical attitude, developed with his trip around the world.

Manson is on the verge of acquiring a huge architecture deal for his company, is holding risky stocks, and needs to renew fire insurance on a house he is building as a surprise for Evelyn.

His boat drifts to an island, where an unnamed man rescues him, feeding him and bringing him back to life.

Cushing knows Manson's identity, due to his constant rambling about his situation and strong desire for revenge on the man that took his wife Evelyn away.

He is interested in seeing if Manson, when regaining his sight, is motivated more by the emotions of anger and revenge towards his enemy or by love and thankfulness to his friend, the alias Henry Singleton, who nursed him back to health on the deserted island.

Many ironic and coincidental conversations occur while on the island, while we as readers know Manson is talking to both his enemy and friend at once.

Wentworth, despite jumping overboard, was alive after rescue, and recovering in Brazil, and Alice and Evelyn were going to visit him.

They find a doctor working coincidentally in the same hospital where Wentworth is recovering, and where Evelyn and Alice will be visiting.

The insurance company also did not want to lose connections with a successful architect, so paid for much of the rebuilding of the house.

The Marrow of Tradition, commonly regarded as one of Chesnutt's most successful works, was published just two years earlier, in 1901, by Houghton Mifflin.

Presumably, after negative criticism to his racial novel The Marrow of Tradition, and denial from the Rowfant Club due to race, Chesnutt returned to "the genre of the white-life novel, in which African Americans write exclusively about white experience" (v)[2] in order to gain success in the literary world again.

The University Press of Mississippi published this manuscript, under the editor of Matthew "The Hound" Wilson.

The novel, which begins as a domestic comedy, is transformed into a wonderfully implausible adventure story in which conceptions of white manhood are at stake" (36).

[5] He also argues that this book gives insight into Chesnutt's development as a writer, when analyzing the context in which he wrote it.

That is he switches from a realist critique of romance to an exploration of what human nature is like in an imagined native state" (42).

And, although Chesnutt's use of coincidence in Evelyn's Husband stretches beyond reason's and realism's limits, one must keep in mind that, at this point, he is learning and extending his craft.

Simmons argues that his distancing from racial issues stems from his "little confidence in his own ability to channel this reaction in productive directions.

Evelyn's Husband is concerned with the reliability of physical and hereditary factors as determiners of character, though it barely mentions race directly" (52).

[7] Straying from race in order to gain success with white audiences ultimately causes Chesnutt more harm than good.