Study Guide to Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell

INTRODUCTION TO MARGARET MITCHELL

MISS MITCHELL AND MRS. MARSH

Margaret Mitchell was born in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1900 and lived there all her life. Like her famous leading lady, Scarlett O’Hara, Miss Mitchell’s ancestors were planters of cotton in the areas around Atlanta before Atlanta was a city. Her father was Eugene Muse Mitchell, an attorney and President of the Atlanta Historical Society. And her mother, Maybelle Stephens, shared the family’s avid interest in local history.

As a child, Margaret Mitchell was steeped in the history of her area. Time and again, she listened to elderly relatives recount the joys of the antebellum period, refight the battles of the war, and relive the ignominies of the Reconstruction. Indeed, Margaret Mitchell had a wealth of source material for a Southern novel in her more distant ancestry. On both sides she was descended from longtime American families and some of her ancestors bear distinct resemblances to characters who appear in Gone With the Wind. One in particular, her maternal great grandfather, had a career remarkably similar to Gerald O’Hara’s. He escaped from Ireland with the English at his back, eventually settled in Georgia, engaged in trade and ultimately became a planter. He married the daughter of an established, old, Catholic family and took her to live in upcountry Georgia with him, as does Gerald in the novel.

EDUCATION

Margaret was educated at local Atlanta schools and attended the Washington Seminary there from 1914 to 1918. She then went to Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, but her college career ended after one year, with the death of her mother. This necessitated her return home to keep house for her father and brother which occupied her until 1922.

During this period Margaret busied herself with the social concerns of a young debutante. She partied, was popular with young men, and saw her future as a young Atlanta matron. Consequently in September of 1922, she married a young North Carolinian named Berrien K. Upshaw. The marriage was destined to last only a few months because Upshaw was emotionally unstable and this instability became clear shortly after the wedding.

CAREER IN JOURNALISM

Within a few months her husband had left Atlanta, and Margaret sought a new life. In December, 1922, she joined the Atlanta Journal. For this paper she wrote regular staff-reporting stories and some features under the by-line Peggy Mitchell. Her writing was very popular locally but really showed none of the promise of what was to come.

Three years later in 1925, Peggy Mitchell married John Marsh, a former copy-reader, and then an executive with the Georgia Power Company. Peggy was an excellent conversationalist and the Marshes gave many interesting parties in Atlanta in the twenties. She was a tiny woman, with auburn hair and the flawless, milky complexion she attributes to the heroine of her novel. But her energy far surpassed the bounds of her small stature.

WORK ON NOVEL BEGINS

A year after her marriage Margaret Mitchell hurt her ankle so severely that she was forced to leave her job at the Atlanta Journal. It was then, in 1926, that she began her momentous novel, most of which was finished in 1929. During this period she suffered many interruptions in her work due to her own poor health and that of members of her family.

Some work continued on the novel but by 1935 only she and her husband had seen the manuscript. It was then that a vice president of the Macmillan Publishing Company came to Atlanta scouting for new American authors. He prevailed upon Margaret Mitchell and eventually got her to show him the book which he knew at once he would publish.

The next eight months Margaret Mitchell spent checking and re-checking historical data in preparation for publication. But no one was prepared for the whirlwind which followed publication in 1936. It was to bring lasting changes to Margaret Mitchell’s quiet life.

FAME AND LOSS OF PRIVACY

Gone With the Wind met with such phenomenal popular success that it became a full-time job just to be its author. In the years that followed its publication, Margaret Mitchell spent much of her time answering the tens of thousands of letters the novel provoked. She was also kept busy with interviews, lectures, and book-autographing. Both she and her husband tried valiantly to cling to the life they had known before the book came out. They kept the same apartment and saw the same friends, but Gone With the Wind dominated their lives. With the release of the motion picture in 1939, privacy was all but gone.

In these years Margaret Mitchell grew to resent the enormous intrusions upon her life brought about by the success of her novel. Aside from the countless letters and invasions of her privacy was her frequent appearance in gossip columns which printed excessive amounts of misinformation about her. There were unending rumors about her health and the state of her marriage and her relationship with the publishers and whether she actually had written the book or not. Since she had never expected the fame that had come to her, she was unprepared for the onslaught of publicity and never really adjusted to it.

In addition to the amount of work created by being the author of such a successful book, Miss Mitchell’s life was complicated, in the years after publication, by her own ill health and that of others close to her. Shortly after publication she was to undergo the terror of having her eyesight fail. Eye hemorrhages, caused by strain and overwork, were to blame. It was several weeks before she could assume a working schedule. In 1943, she underwent a back operation to correct a continuously painful condition resulting from riding accidents as a child and an automobile accident in the mid-1930s.

In addition to her own sickness, she was busied by the illnesses of her father whose condition demanded much attention from 1938 until his death in 1944. And then, in 1945, her husband, John, suffered a massive heart attack. His recovery was very slow and he was never able to return to his job at Georgia Power. When recovered, he concerned himself with much of the business generated by Gone With the Wind.

With all of these pressures upon her, Margaret Mitchell never really had time to return to writing although her public clamored for more. Frequently in the years after 1936 rumors would fly that she was working on something new, another novel or perhaps a sequel. She always denied them but they persisted.

DEATH AT 49

On August 11, 1949, Margaret and John were crossing Peachtree Street on their way to the movies when an off-duty taxi driver shot out of control and hit Margaret. She suffered severe head injuries and never regained consciousness, dying on August 16. Her death caused world-wide notice and expressions of regret, much of which centered on the theme of her having written only one book.

If she had written more the world would never have known because, under the terms of her will, all her papers were destroyed. The only exception was enough of the original manuscript of Gone With the Wind to prove her authorship should that ever be necessary. But that seems highly unlikely. Margaret Mitchell brought to her task such a unique combination of background and talent that there could be little doubt that she herself had produced this magnificent work.

WRITING AND PUBLISHING GONE WITH THE WIND

After Margaret Mitchell resigned from the Atlanta Journal, in ill health because of her improperly healed ankle, she read deeply into the background of her locality. A natural writer, she was always inventing stories, devising plots, and building characters. So when she sat at the typewriter in 1926 to begin her long work, she had it outlined in her mind in total. In fact, she wrote the end first and worked backward through the book, chapter by chapter.

As chapters were completed, she stored them in envelopes which began to accumulate in the Marsh’s small apartment. Her work was by no means regular since there were many calls on her time due to illness. Also, research had to be carried out as the book was being written since historical detail plays such an important role in the work. She had to delve deeply into the economic and social aspects of the war and Reconstruction as well as the political history of those times.

Margaret Mitchell wrote directly on the typewriter as do many trained in journalism and much of her revision was done in her own hand, written in between the typed lines. She wrote suggestions for future revisions on the outside of the