Evelyn Scott

#2

1987

In 1913, at the age of nineteen, Elsie Dunn - later to be known as Evelyn Scott - turned her back on the genteel Southern world she was born into and ran off to Brazil with a married Tulane University dean more than twice her age. Living in tropical exile under assumed names, the couple produced a son and endured a grueling series of hardships and failures that would provide Evelyn Scott with the raw material for a singular work of fictionalized autobiography. That work, published in 1923 amid expressions of mingled outrage and admiration from the critical establishment, was Escapade. While offering a chronicle of the runaways' Brazilian interlude, Escapade is a tale both literary and autobiographical, filled with striking imagery and written in a style that is audacious and extraordinary modern. Indeed, in many ways the book anticipates Scott's 1929 modernist masterpiece The Wave, widely considered to be one of the greatest Civil War novels ever written. Though present-day readers are unlikely to be shocked by the adulterous liaison depicted here, they will find much of interest - and much to admire - in this spare but beautiful account of one woman's daring rejection of the mores of her time.

#3

1964

When published in 1929, Evelyn Scott's The Wave was lauded as "magnificent," "monumental," and "masterly" in its experimental, almost cinematic, narrative technique and its modernist view of war and history. For those same reasons, less visionary reviewers labeled it "a failure.". Without sentimentality, nostalgia, or a hint of southern apology, Scott takes as her subject the Civil War and shapes it into a kaleidoscopic design. She tells the story not of a single family or person, but of countless characters - northern, southern, black, white, male, and female - from nearly every conceivable background in many different predicaments. Like drops of water in a wave, they are all caught up in the overwhelming force of war, of history. The Wave set a standard against which all subsequent war novels have been compared. It was partly responsible for inspiring a trend in sprawling books on the Civil War that culminated in Margaret Mitchell's romanticized version in 1936, but it remains unique as a literary mosaic of the human condition, a novel of international consequence and boldly innovative method.