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 Title:  "St. Elmo" and its Author  
 Published:  1995 
 Subjects:  University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text 
 Description: In the rush to keep any sort of pace with the lighter and noisier literature of the day it is pleasant and worth while occasionally to spend a few minutes looking over the publishers' lists at the ends of the popular novels of thirty odd years ago, and from them to contrast the tastes of the past and the present generations—a contrast which is very far from being entirely flattering to the readers of to-day. At the head of such lists we may be sure to find the names of those writers who corresponded with the authors of what are now known as "the best sellers"—we realise the claims that Mary J. Holmes and Ann S. Stevens and Augusta J. Evans and May Agnes Fleming then had to popular attention. We recognise many laudable ambitions in the advertisements of books dealing with "the habits of good society," with "the nice points of taste and good manners, and the art of making oneself agreeable," with "the art of polite conversation," and the forms in which letters of business, of friendship, of society, of respectful endearment should be couched. At first sight all this is likely to provoke rather contemptuous amusement. And how unjustly! The forms may be quaint and obsolete, but the sentiments are homely and praiseworthy, and in similar literature of to-day there are just as many platitudes, just as much that is silly and not nearly so much that is sincere. The average highly successful novel of that time was no more literature than is the average highly successful novel of to-day, and the old was generally marked, it must be acknowledged, by an airiness and pedantry that to-day would not reach the public without pretty severe editing. On the other hand, however, the old novels almost always had stories to tell, and they told them in a manner to make them from end to end vitally interesting to that class of readers to which they were designed to appeal.
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