Going All Fan-Girl on Margaret Mitchell

In July during the RWA conference in Atlanta, Georgia, author Diana Quincy and I headed into the city center to visit Margaret Mitchell’s home. Yep, Margaret Mitchell, the author who wrote a book I’ve read at least ten times. A little unknown Pulitzer Prize winning work called Gone with the Wind, featuring a heroine still popular almost 100 years after she first appeared—Scarlett O’Hara.

We were so eager to visit one of the most admired female writers of all time that we meandered up to her house—now a museum run by the Georgia Historical Society—headed on in, and where told by a gift shop attendant, “You are way too early. The tour begins at 11:00 a.m.”

Okay. We were excited.

Returning promptly at 11:00 a.m., the tour group assembled and was comprised of mostly . . . romance writers! The interesting thing about taking a tour of an author’s house with authors is that you really get a sense of what is fact versus fiction.

For example, there was a wonderful picture of Mitchell typing away on her Remington typewriter propped up on a wooden sewing machine. Her hair was swept neatly back, her dress was fashionable and tidy. There were no signs of clutter, no discarded papers filled with typos, no dirty coffee mugs nor cigarette buds in ashtrays.

Exactly how I look when in the middle of a story—ask the mailman, he’ll confirm it. Of course, the other tour members got a great laugh out of that picture, as well. It’s exactly how you’d expect an author to look in the movies. Again, fact versus fiction and in this case, fiction won.

So I fully expected the rest of the tour to be ho-hum, sweet, neat, Margaret Mitchell writing her masterpiece.

Talk about misguided prejudgments. I was pleasantly surprised by what I learned. And, perhaps you will too.

Margaret was a rebel. That’s right. When you look at her publicity pictures it’s hard to tell, given they were staged and that we’re looking back to the 1920’s so everything seems more proper. But think “Roaring 20’s” with flappers and dance halls and lots of risky, swinging clothing.

The scene in the movie Gone with the Wind, where Scarlett is on a table surrounded by her beaux, well that was Mitchell. Evidently she frequently danced the night away surrounded by young men who loved her high kicks from her spot on the table tops.

A girl after my own heart.

Mitchell was feisty and headstrong, often disagreeing with men over issues of the time. She became a reporter for the Atlanta Journal Sunday Magazine, where she offered advice, societal features on Georgians, and book reviews.

Honing her craft, as writers like to say. It certainly didn’t hurt to learn how to properly craft, revise, and edit the 129 articles she worked on. Considering that Gone with the Wind was a mere 1,037 pages long, she needed a solid grasp on what she was doing or it would have been ten years of writing drivel, and no one wants to spend time writing or reading that. It’s safe to say that Gone with the Wind is a masterpiece, a story that she wrote the ending to first and spent years perfecting.

Mitchell’s grandfather was fond of telling her stories about the Civil War. I immediately imagine her sitting at his knee, listening to him describe in detail the burning of Atlanta or how those damn Yankees wouldn’t take the confederate money. Clearly, her grandfather had a huge influence on her.

Her first husband died in World War I. Think Ashley, right?

Her second husband “Red” (I think that is what the tour guide said—not Rhett but of course your mind draws the parallel) was a playboy/lived by his pants kind of guy. At her wedding, her family thought she was marrying the wrong guy—that the best man, a good friend of hers, should have been her husband.

So when she got tired of Red’s philandering ways . . . she married the best man named John Marsh. Mitchell is famous for saying after the success of Gone with the Wind that she just wanted to be known as Mrs. John Marsh.

Again, in my opinion, there’s fact and fiction, and this seems a bit fictitious to me. If Hollywood came a-knocking for my book, I’d like to think I’d be that sweet, that after I worked my butt off nitpicking over each and every word, crying over deleting scenes, doubting myself daily, that I’d be that humble. Just saying.

A few other interesting tidbits:
The Tara in the movie wasn’t the same place in her book. This annoyed Mitchell, and let’s face it, if she spent ten years creating a world that revolved around a humble Irish home, can you blame her for not liking the changes? Though the scene in Gone with the Wind, where Scarlet clasps a handful of dirt as the clouds lift off of Tara, and says, “I will never go hungry again”, well, Hollywood was onto something there!

Another interesting tidbit that Diana reminded me of (it’s funny what some people remember that others do not) is that during a screening of Gone with the Wind, Mitchell and Clark Gabel disappeared into the ladies room for a . . . smoke. It took 20 minutes. Now you tell me, fact or fiction? I so want it to be fact!

I hope you find my recap of our wonderful visit into the world of Margaret Mitchell interesting. She was quite a personality. But, she did create one of the most iconic heroines every put to paper, so it shouldn’t have been surprising, after all.

Please feel free to comment!

Posted by Michele Mannon on August 6, 2013

https://thevioletfemmes.wordpress.com/2013/08/06/going-all-fan-girl-on-margaret-mitchell/