Elsie Venner

Its title character may have been inspired by a woman that Oliver Wendell Holmes knew while living in western Massachusetts.

One of his students, Bernard Langdon, had to interrupt his medical studies to earn money as a teacher, first at a public school, then at the Apollinean Female Institute.

[1][2] Alternatively, the character of Elsie Venner may have been modeled on the famous feminist pioneer Margaret Fuller,[3] whom Holmes knew from his school days in Cambridge.

Elsie Venner was Holmes's first novel, originally published serially in The Atlantic Monthly beginning in December 1859 as "The Professor's Story".

Holmes wrote in the second preface to Elsie Venner that his aim was "to test the doctrine of 'original sin' and human responsibility for the distorted violation coming under that technical denomination".

[6] Scholars have identified various themes that might be the "grave scientific doctrine" Holmes purported to be exploring in the book, including early psychiatry, nervous disorders, contagiousness of disease, childbed fever, and more.

[7] Scholar Jonathan B. Imber notes that the novel also addresses contemporary tensions in what the public views as authority.

According to Imler, Holmes was aware of the rising need for medical professionals during a period of declining influence from religious authority as people sought answers for their troubles and illnesses.

Holmes personally rejected much of the conservative orthodoxy of his father's religion while also spending much of his life calling for doctors to recognize their own limitations.

"[9] The novel bears a resemblance to Nathaniel Hawthorne's short story "Rappaccini's Daughter", a tale which explored original sin several years before Elsie Venner was published.

[11] Holmes himself referred to Elsie Venner as one of his "medicated novels", along with The Guardian Angel (1867) and A Mortal Antipathy (1885), because of the characters' health or mental problems which are "diagnosed" in the text.