THE PASSION OF MISS AUGUSTA
The Passion of Miss Augusta takes the blockbuster 1866 novel St. Elmo by Southern writer Augusta Evans Wilson and expands its narrative across two centuries. Wilson, like her alter ego Edna Earl in the novel, was determined to defy social convention and pursue a career as a writer rather than conform to the domestic role expected by the Victorians. St. Elmo is seen as a forerunner of romanticized Southern novels like Gone with the Wind as well as the Southern Gothic fiction of William Faulkner and Tennessee Williams. Although her novels and those of other women writers were dismissed as romantic pulp by critics, feminists have found much to like in Wilson's independent heroines and the subversive message they carried to a huge following into the 1920s and beyond.
