Lives of the Novelists by John Sutherland

Author:John Sutherland [Sutherland, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Profile Books UK
Published: 2011-10-27T07:00:00+00:00

Perhaps it should have been.

FN

Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

MRT

Lolita

Biog

B. Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years and The American Years (2 vols, 1990, 1991)

168. Margaret Mitchell 1900–1949

If I were a boy, I would try for West Point, if I could make it, or well I’d be a prize fighter – anything for the thrills. Margaret Mitchell, aged fifteen, in her diary

The author of Gone with the Wind (‘GWTW’ to its in-group fans) was born in Atlanta, Georgia, where her father was an attorney with a distinguished southern bloodline. Her mother, ‘Maybelle’, was Irish by ancestry and fiery by temperament and – one may plausibly suppose – the original of Scarlett O’Hara. As a child, Margaret saturated herself in the history of the South, and specifically of Atlanta during the Civil War and Reconstruction. They were still relatively recent and deeply felt events and there were those living who could remember the burning of their town, which is the centrepiece of both novel and film. ‘It’s happened before and it will happen again,’ Maybelle once told her daughter, ‘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.’ Personal disasters, and the need to start over again and again, certainly afflicted Mitchell in her young womanhood. Her fiancé was killed fighting in France in 1918. Her mother died in the 1919 influenza epidemic and her father was invalided at the same period. Margaret was obliged to give up her studies at Smith College, Massachusetts, to come home and take charge – all of which can be tied in, allegorically, with the fictional sufferings of the indomitable Scarlett, and her return to Tara after the sack of Atlanta and the ruin of her plantation, with the stoical ‘tomorrow is another day’.

It was still the custom for young Southern ladies to ‘come out’ and Margaret made her debut in 1920. She is reported as being lively – a ‘flapper’ even – and unafraid of risk. It was in this spirit that she contracted a disastrous marriage with ‘Red’ K. Upshaw in 1922 (arguably one of the originals of Rhett K. Butler), an ex-football player, a rogue and a bootlegger. He is reported to have raped his wife – not that any such act was criminal at the time. But Mitchell was not prepared to take it and the couple parted, bitterly, after a few months, divorcing in 1924. She went on to make a wiser second marriage with the newspaperman John Marsh in 1925, the best man at her first wedding. This match, unlike the first, worked out. Mitchell retained her birth name for her fiction and used ‘Peggy Mitchell’ for her journalism.

Peggy was a successful local journalist, doing regular columns and interviews for the Atlanta papers. Legend has it that she began writing her ‘Civil War Novel’ while recovering in bed with a broken ankle. Her husband brought her the necessary research materials,

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