An orphan girl of ferocious learning is taken into a rich Georgia household and refuses, for six hundred pages, to marry its master — a Byronic wreck who has ruined women and lost his faith, and who will not be had until he has been remade. Evans wrote it in 1866 out of a defeated South, and it sold so well that steamboats, towns and cigars were named St. Elmo. Fifty-seven plates of storm light and reading girls by Winslow Homer and Albert Bierstadt run through the volume, matching the novel's weather of the heart.
