St. Elmo (novel)

Featuring the sexual tension between the protagonist St. Elmo, a cynical man, and the heroine Edna Earl, a beautiful and devout girl, the novel was about the agency of women who could save men from apostasy.

Augusta Jane Evans (May 8, 1835 – May 9, 1909) finished her celebrated novel at El Dorado, a historical home in Columbus, Georgia.

[4] Recent feminist scholars have noted the complexity in categorizing her work, reading the typical marriage themes of the Victorian novel superficially, and giving more weight to the intellectual capability of her female characters.

Although Edna was not fully confined to the domestic sphere, Wilson's feminine ideal was not the suffragette style of feminism, which did not appeal to all classes of women in 1886.

Critics, especially modern feminists, have viewed Edna's marriage as a disappointing conclusion to the character's otherwise spirited defense of women's intellect and agency.

Some of the content casts women of the French Revolution in a negative light, calling them "perverted" and accusing feminists of criminal acts.

St. Elmo School, though first unnamed and founded around 1850, took on the novel's name around 1875 when a wood-framed, one-room schoolhouse was first constructed in the rural setting.