8th November: Margaret Mitchell

Margaret Mitchell, Author of Gone With the Wind was born on this date in 1900. Some things you may not know about her and her book.

1. Her middle name was Munnerlyn.
2. For most of her childhood, Margaret was dressed as a boy. This was because her dress caught fire when she was three and her mother didn't want it to happen again. She was given the nickname "Jimmy" after a comic strip character, and would pretend to be a boy named Jimmy in order to play with her brother.
3. She started writing when she was very young, beginning with stories about animals, fairy tales and adventure stories. She would bind and illustrate her stories. At age eleven she gave a name to her publishing enterprise: "Urchin Publishing Co." She wrote her first novella at fifteen. It was called Lost Laysen, and she gave it to a boyfriend, Henry Love Angel. The novella was found among letters she had written to him in 1994. The novella was published in 1996, eighty years after it was written, and became a New York Times Best Seller.
4. Her favourite author when she was growing up was Edith Nesbit, especially Five Children and It and The Phoenix and the Carpet.
5. She wanted to become a psychiatrist, but had to leave college to look after the household when her mother died of Spanish flu in 1919.
6. Her first engagement was to Clifford West Henry, a Harvard graduate, and army lieutenant, who gave her a ring before leaving for France; where he was mortally wounded. Her first marriage was to Berrien “Red” Upshaw. Her family disliked him and they were proved right - he was abusive and within two years the marriage had broken down. Less than a year later she married John Marsh, who had been the best man at her first wedding.
7. She liked to use the abbreviated form of Margaret, Peggy, or Peg, after the mythical winged horse, Pegasus, which she'd adopted as an icon.
8. She started writing Gone With the Wind while recovering from an ankle injury. Her husband got so tired of lugging books home for the library for her to read that he said, "For God's sake, Peggy, can't you write a book instead of reading thousands of them?" The rest, as they say, is history. Gone With the Wind took three years to write.
9. In early drafts of the novel, the heroine was called Pansy O'Hara.
10. Margaret Mitchell died after being run over by a drunk driver on the way to the theatre with her husband. She was 48.