What Margaret Mitchell and Scarlett O'Hara have in common, or Why the author of Gone with the Wind didn't like her character

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

Most fans novel "Gone with the Wind" know about his heroine Scarlett O'Hara much more than about the author, the writer Margaret Mitchell … Many readers only know that this novel was her first and only work. Meanwhile, the life of Margaret Mitchell could serve as the basis for the plot of more than one book. In fact, the writer and her incredibly popular heroine had much more in common than she herself admitted.

Assumptions that Margaret Mitchell wrote Scarlett from herself have been repeatedly expressed, but each time the writer categorically rejected such statements and even went into a rage. She never hid her dislike for the main character of the novel: "".

To all attempts to compare her with Scarlett Margaret replied: "". In addition, the writer considered the main character not Scarlett, but Melanie. But in fact, in some character traits and life vicissitudes, she had much more in common with her scandalous heroine than it seems at first glance.

The writer really borrowed many of the circumstances of Scarlett's life from her own biography. Her ancestry is very similar to that of the Scarlett family. For example, Margaret's paternal ancestors were from Ireland, and both grandfathers fought in the war between North and South, and she listened to their stories about the war from childhood. Margaret was herself a southerner - she was born in Atlanta, where many of the novel's events take place. The writer was a real beauty and did not know the end of her fans just like Scarlett, although at the beginning of the novel it was stated that she was "not beautiful." Peggy, as her friends called her (by the way, the original name of the heroine of "Gone with the Wind" was consonant - Pansy), had so many fans that she recorded in a special album those who wanted to invite her out on a date. There were more than forty of them.

Mitchell's character also had a lot of similar traits: coquetry, stubbornness, fortitude, adventurousness, willfulness and independence. When she was 18 years old, her fiancé died in the war, and soon her mother died of the Spanish flu, after which her father fell ill with a nervous breakdown. Margaret took control of the house, just as Scarlett did. But when the Mitchell family found themselves in a difficult financial situation, the girl began to look not for a profitable party, but for a good job. Like Scarlett, she had a masculine character and a masculine business acumen. At the age of 17, she wrote in her diary that if she had been born as a boy, she would certainly have entered a military school.

Often in the press it was stated that an ordinary housewife wrote the novel "Gone with the Wind", but this was not entirely true: Margaret became a housewife after she managed to work as a leading reporter for the Atlanta Journal - and this was at a time when journalism was not was considered a female profession. She inherited her independent disposition from her mother, who was a suffragette. And after a photograph of Margaret in men's clothes and a cowboy hat was published in the "Feminist Manifesto", her grandmother abandoned her.

The personal life of the writer was also quite stormy. Her first husband, Barren Upshaw, who received the nickname Red for his red hair (consonant with the name of Rhett Butler, whose prototype he is believed to be), was distinguished by an irrepressible disposition, often changed his mistresses and places of work, spat on public opinion, drank, squandered money and raised his hand to his wife … They divorced 10 months after the wedding. Margaret was not afraid of the divorce proceedings, although in those days in the southern states this procedure was considered scandalous and humiliating. In 1925, the girl remarried, to her longtime admirer John Marsh, with whom she lived for all the remaining years. After marriage, she left the newspaper and really became a housewife and writer.

Mitchell did not believe in the success of her novel and took it to the publishing house only 2 years after finishing work on it. Unexpected fame and overwhelming popularity puzzled her rather than delighted her. Mitchell refused to write a sequel to the novel and to participate in its adaptation. Until the end of her life, she did not write anything else, which made many doubt the true authorship of Gone with the Wind. Doubts were dispelled only after the tragic death of the writer. In 1949 she fell under the wheels of a drunk taxi driver and died at the age of 48. According to her will, her husband kept the rough notes of her work on the novel.

The actress who starred in Gone With the Wind also had a lot in common with the heroine of the novel. Vivien Leigh and Scarlett O'Hara: Find 10 Differences.