• A new edition of an old classic! • Now illustrated! • The sources of every poem and quotation in St. Elmo is listed (all 151 of them!) • St. Elmo is edited and streamlined for today's readers (but with respect for Augusta's original text) •St. Elmo is more tightly focused on the love story -- and what a story it is! “It is useless to tell you how devotedly I love you; and yet you have shown my love no mercy.” Flung into the world after the death of her beloved grandfather, 15-year-old Edna Earl, an inveterate bookworm, gets her chance at an education when a rich widow takes her into her home. Edna is overjoyed – until she meets the master of the house, St. Elmo Murray, the widow’s son, a brooding, Byronic man who wears defiance on his brow and misery in his heart. Pure-hearted Edna shrinks from St. Elmo’s dissipation and tries to hide from him through her intensive studies, though they continually clash. Naturally, the seraphim and the devil fall in love. When a desperate St. Elmo lays bare his sordid past to Edna and pleads with her to give her life to purify his, Edna flees temptation by leaving for New York. By day, she works as a governess; by night she gives herself over to writing books. A fantastically ambitious writer, Edna is destroying her health to be an author; and she fights her famished heart in denying her love for St. Elmo. But a heart attack leaves her future in darkness. Ambition, redemption, or death? Fans of clean and wholesome historical romances, as well as books of Georgette Heyer, Mimi Matthews, Julianne Donaldson, and Stacy Henrie, will be swept away by this stunning romance.St. Elmo by Augusta Jane Evans, first published in 1866, was the third most popular novel of the 1800s. This new edition has been annotated, illustrated, and edited to within an inch of its life in order to bring this old favorite to a new generation of readers.