ABSTRACT
Evans writing career began out of necessity, which is fortunate for literature, yet one cannot help but feel that Matthew Evans was an impulsive man. In her fourth novel, St. Elmo, Evans has her orphan heroine, take a train to Columbus with aspirations of working in a factory there. Regardless of the river towns potential, Matt Evans was like many young men in America at the time, itching to move on to greener pastures because America had become the Mecca of promising opportunities. The Historic Columbus Foundation has an old black-and-white photograph of the pond that used to be directly behind St. Elmo, when the plantation had been turned into a boarding school for women. It shows young women in white muslin, luxuriating in a boat on the pond alongside several swans. Evans main character in St. Elmo is named Edna Earl.
