The Passion of Miss Augusta is part fiction, part non-fiction, based on the life and work of Alabama writer Augusta Jane Evans (1835-1909).  Evans broke the conventions of  Victorian womanhood in her life and in her novels, where the heroines are always ambitious, self-educated and strong.  A parallel narrative is based on Evans’ largely forgotten blockbuster novel St. Elmo, published in 1866 and the second best selling American novel of the nineteenth century.  The social conventions in St. Elmo seem little different than those portrayed in the Technicolor Hollywood films about the South from the 1950s, and in fact Augusta Evans has been called the forerunner of Southern Gothic literature.    Partly completed, The Passion of Miss Augusta intertwines a silent film adaptation of St. Elmo with a 1950s version, while the true story of Augusta Jane Evans pulses underneath.   The film explores issues of Southern womanhood as well as the evolution of a romanticized, literary South after its defeat in the Civil War.