The Beguiled is based on a novel set in the American South.
 Coppola also faced criticism for minimizing the story of the people experiencing actual hardship in favor of depicting, albeit authentically, the lavish lifestyle of her protagonists, thus minimizing the importance of a weighty topic, which was not the first time one of Coppola's films was said to expose the sociocultural affordances of her own childhood
Initially, some of the school's residents want McBurney to be delivered as a prisoner of war to the Confederate Army, but Miss Farnsworth decides that they will let his leg heal before they decide what they will do with him

