The original “steel magnolia”, Augusta Jane Evans (1835-1909) overcame her family’s poverty to become one of the three best-selling American authors of the nineteenth century   Her fictional heroines embodied her own aspirations -- to live for their art, to resist marriage long enough to establish their own professional careers, to express their own opinions rather than defer to men.   During the Civil War, settled in Mobile, Alabama, she was a strong advocate of the Confederate cause -- and a ferocious critic of the men elected to be its leaders.   The Passion of Miss Augusta, with support thus far from the A.S. Mitchell and  Ben May Foundations, will include dramatized scenes from Evans’ fifth novel St. Elmo (1866), which sold more than one million copies and whose main character was an ambitious writer like Evans herself, determined to make her way in a world dominated by men.