Anatomy of a Dress

I am now a smidge obsessed with Margaret Mitchell. My train of thought went like this: my instincts are telling me the person who wrote this book had strongly held convictions about the integrity of the south. Wait, who exactly IS the person who wrote this book?

And down the rabbit hole I went.

Newspaperwoman, suffragist, flapper, Smith College dropout. Came home at 20 to care for her father and older brother after her mother died in the influenza pandemic of 1918. Found both of her great loves simultaneously. Married the swarthy bootlegger and divorced a few years later; married the slight shy newspaperman who was her other great love and intellectual mentor less than a year later. Wrote GWTW on a Remington typewriter while incapacitated by a broken ankle. Struck by an off-duty cab driver in 1949 on Peachtree Street, the selfsame avenue where the central characters of her epic lived and loved and fought, and convalesced for five long days before expiring and being laid to rest in the
cemetery where her characters–and her family–were buried.

My favorite stories about Mme. Mitchell:

When, on one memorable day, she announced to her mother that she could not understand mathematics and would not return to school, Maybelle dragged her daughter to a rural road where plantation houses had fallen into ruin. “It’s happened before and it will happen again,” Maybelle sternly lectured the girl. “And when it does happen, everyone loses everything and everyone is equal. They all start again with nothing at all except the cunning of their brain and the strength of their hands.”

Mitchell lived as a modest Atlanta newspaperwoman until a visit from MacMillan editor Harold Latham, who visited Atlanta in 1935. Latham was scouring the South for promising writers, and Mitchell agreed to escort him around Atlanta at the request of her friend, Lois Cole, who worked for Latham. Latham was enchanted with Mitchell, and asked her if she had ever written a book. Mitchell demurred. “Well, if you ever do write a book, please show it to me first!” Latham implored. Later that day, a friend of Mitchell, having heard this conversation laughed. “Imagine, anyone as silly as Peggy writing a book!” she said. Mitchell stewed over this comment, went home, and found most of the old, crumbling envelopes containing her disjointed manuscript. She arrived at The Georgian Terrace Hotel, just as Latham prepared to depart Atlanta. “Here,” she said, “take this before I change my mind!”

An added bonus: the Margaret Mitchell House in Atlanta has a book burning club and their slogan is GET LIT!

Well I never.