The Wind as Literature – Q&A With Melissa Maday

When did you first read GWTW/what were your initial impressions?

I had seen the movie — or parts of it — over and over on TV, but I hadn’t read the book. At Smith, during the first semester of my sophomore year, I took an American lit class with the then-senior member of the English Department. It was 1998, and he’d been at the college for close to 40 years. The students in my class wanted to know if he had known Sylvia Plath as a student or instructor at Smith  but no one wanted to ask him. Finally, they talked me into asking. I raised my hand and asked simply”Professor Murphy, did you know Sylvia Plath when she was here?”

In response, he sighed heavily, shook his head, and leaned on the podium: he said, “We were here at the same time, and I suppose our paths must have crossed,” then he sighed again and added. “I don’t know what the big deal is about Sylvia Plath. The best writer this college ever produced was Margaret Mitchell.”

Let me get this straight...people don't consider Gone With the Wind to be great literature?

I was so surprised by this — both that Mitchell had gone to Smith, and that an editor of the Norton Anthology thought she was a better writer than Plath — that i went to the library after class and checked out Gone With the Wind. I read it over the next few weeks, and I was struck by the careful characterization and sumptuous detail. And, carrying its 1037 pages around campus with me for a few weeks also served as a real conversation piece: I was amazed to find out that many women I met felt connected to the book. I heard lots of stories about people whose moms read it every summer, or who had read it for the first time at the age of 12, then read it again and again … it became clear to me that it was a book that meant something to women of different ages and from different backgrounds. There was an unexpected (for me) universality to Scarlett’s story.

You wrote about GWTW in your senior thesis at Smith College. What was your topic?

I wanted to look at the book as a piece of literature. So much had (and has) been written about the movie, but the book’s popularity tended to remove it from consideration as “serious” literature. My thesis sought to read it as literature and position it in the canon of American literature, and — more specifically — American literature by women.  Fortunately for me, the book about Margaret Mitche”s journalism career came out while i was writing my thesis, and that book really served to put GWTW into perspective for me I saw where MM got her trained eye for detail, her ability to describe and explicate characters, and her clear, precise writing style. 

It was also really rewarding for me to write my thesis about an author who was also an alumna of my college. I’m grateful that i had the chance to spend so much time reading and writing about a book that means so much to so many people. I ended up writing a lot about the differences between the movie and the book to highlight that much of the exaggeration and excess we associate with the film was not in the novel.

What do you find most compelling/upsetting/awesome about Margaret Mitchell as an author?

I love her authorial perspective — GWTW is a novel written by a journalist: someone practiced and expert at observation and description. It is not the weepy, melodramatic, sentimental artifact that the movie has come to be. I think it’s most interesting that Mitchell did not like to be compared to Scarlett (in fact, she was kind of horrified by such comparisons). It’s also important to understand that Mitchell had a keen understanding of historical scope — GWTW wasn’t meant to stand on its own, it was the first of a planned trilogy of novels about the American South. But, of course, her untimely death prevented her from going on.

And, I really enjoyed reading about her utter consternation at the making of the movie — my favorite quotation is when she wrote that they were making the Wilkes’ plantation look like Grand Central Station. She was really worried about what the residents of Jonesboro, Georgia would think when they saw how their town was portrayed.

Can you speak to GWTW as a classic/feminist work/work of “serious” or popular fiction?

Yes! GWTW has been repeatedly misnamed as sentimental fiction, when, in fact, it is an historical novel about the Civil War — but from a woman’s perspective — Mitchell was a 20th-century southern woman giving voice to the women before her. She told their stories beautifully in the novel, and she created an archetypal flawed heroine in Scarlett. It always bothers me when critics or scholars contend that “serious” and “popular’ fiction have to be placed in different categories — I think it takes a truly gifted writer to blur those lines, and Mitchell succeeded at it in this novel. To understand this, it’s important to separate the novel from the film, and I think most who only know the latter are surprised by the intensity and depth of Mitchell’s prose.

I use the novel often in my own classroom — I haven’t taught it in full (yet), but it’s a great example of strong, descriptive narrative, and it holds up well under the scrutiny of close reading.

This week’s prize is one you might not have on your bookshelf…a copy of Molly Haskell’s Frankly My Dear: Gone With the Wind Revisited.  Just comment on a blog post this week to win…and watch for a special bonus giveaway later this week!  And now, please welcome Melanie Fishbane with a few realizations about GWTW’s prickly heroine.

Scarlett: The Mean Girl I Learned to Admire

I was really flattered when Erin asked me to guest blog in commemoration of the 75^th anniversary of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With The Wind. Mostly because it is not a book that I feel that I have any expertise in. I haven’t clocked the same amount of hours as I have with some of the other classic novels I study. My focus has tended to be on Anne Shirley, Laura Ingalls or Jo March. Scarlett O’Hara always seemed outside of my world view.

However, I loved having the chance to revisit this novel, because it gave me an opportunity to clock some of those hours I just mentioned. In the process, I realized how much GWTW has been a part of my reading life.

My copy of GWTW is stolen from my mother’s bookshelf. I get confused as to whether she had it first, or, someone gave it me, but somehow it landed on my bookshelf as a teenager and its remained there ever since.  It’s been there for so long, I guess it doesn’t matter. I left it at my parent’s house when I moved out because until I was settled, I didn’t want it to get damaged.  In fact, when preparing for this blog post, I called my mother and asked her if she knew where it was.

I started describing it to her, but she knew exactly what it looked like: grey, hardcover with the dust jacket long gone. The corner edges frayed, the spine worn and the pages yellowed.  I think at one point, the top of the book had some kind of dark ink, but it is now spotted making it look like I once spilled black coffee on it.  The edition is from 1954 and inside there are two columns of writing on each page.  After I got off the phone with her, I found it behind the glass case hutch in the living room with my other special books.

Melanie's worn copy of Gone With the Wind.

I’m sure it sounds sacrilegious to admit this, but I didn’t like Scarlett at first. This made my first reading of GWTW challenging.  Being mostly teased and betrayed by catty young girls during my elementary and middle school years didn’t warm me to the idea of reading about one. I couldn’t relate to her scheming ways or why boys found her so attractive.

It probably won’t be surprising, that I identified more with Melanie.  For two reasons:  1) She got the guy that Scarlett wanted to marry her; 2) Well, we shared the same name. It seemed disloyal to not be on her side. Still, like Scarlett, I knew that I would never be as good as that fictional Melanie. (I’m not sure how many people could) and so, my connection to her was short-lived.

Over the years, I dumped a lot of the mean girl baggage and became friends with someone who counts Scarlett as one of her favourite heroines. Listening to her talk about Scarlett, I realized that maybe there was more to her than just a spoiled rich girl. So, I re-read and re-watched the movie with new eyes and I saw it.

Scarlett is a survivor.

She has tenacity and stubbornness and willingness to not take “no” for an answer.   Her perseverance and fortitude against immeasurable odds, demonstrates something that we all strive for…and that is passion.  To know what it is you want and to go after it.  Even if he says that he no longer gives a damn, or your house has burned down, or, the man you thought you loved married another, none of that matters if you know what you want. Scarlett does. Now, I might not agree with her methods or how she goes about getting what she wants, but I admire the fact that she has something to go after.

I guess that makes me a Scarlett convert.

Melanie Fishbane is starting her second semester at the Vermont College of Fine Arts where she is working on her first Young Adult novel. With over fifteen year working in YA/Kids lit at various Canadian book chains, she decided it was time to write one herself.  She writes book reviews for the Canadian Children’s Book News and is active with online communities promoting children’s literature, Laura Ingalls Wilder and L.M. Montgomery.  You can see her blogging about writing, YA and her love of classic children’s lit at http://melaniefishbane.blogspot.com/

“As God Is My Witness…” – A Quote for Hard Times

I have an annoying habit. I quote things. I am the sort of person that breaks into Singin’ in the Rain when it rains (sad, true, now available on the internet). I love the smell of a lot of things in the morning. I tell people I like from the first glance that this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship. And among these quotations that I use more or less compulsively, I have one that’s reserved for when things are bad. Really, really bad. Or as bad as First World Problems go, anyway. Deadlines, excruciating social situations, deadlines, disgusting but inevitable house chores, deadlines, hangovers, hours stranded in the airport, deadlines (did I mention I am bad with deadlines?).

Any one of these things has, at one point in my life, featured above the blanks in a Scarlett O’Hara-style statement. “As God is my witness,” I said, time and again, “____ isn’t going to lick me. I’m going to live through this, and when it’s over I’m never going to write another paper/attend another class reunion/drink Cuba Libre/fall victim to an Icelandic volcano again.” Of course, not one of these things would actually stay a one-off occurrence (not even the Icelandic volcano part, and what were the chances of that happening again?). But in the end it didn’t matter that much, because parodying this line actually helped me get through things when they happened.

So I started thinking. What was to this line that made it so comforting? I am going to go on a limb here and say that large part of it was simply comedic value. It is just one of those lines that everyone uses and abuses, so parodied that there is almost no substance left to it.

See what I mean? The phrase hardly has any substance left!

But if besides the indisputable value of humor in bad situations (and, let’s face it, there is some comfort in knowing that no matter how bad things are, you can still crack a worse joke), this line offers a different type of comfort too, I think this can only come from the novel’s “appeal to fundamental emotions,” as one begrudging critic once put it. What this line sells is the promise – or, if you want, the illusion – of self reliance and self sufficiency in the face of adversities of all sorts. It basically sells you the hope that you can eventually have control over things that now seem overwhelming.

Of course, it is a cliché, but all clichés are lessons our culture already learned. And I think that perhaps, at the time Gone with the Wind was published, the world desperately needed exactly this sort of lesson. There had rarely been more disempowering times for the individual faced with the forces of history as the beginning of the 20th century. People had seen their lives torn apart in a war like no other they had encountered or heard of before, a war that seemed to have nothing to do with individual soldiers and their courage and skill, and everything to do with bombs and gas, killing impersonally and from afar. Pitched against something like this, men and women were powerless, as they would later be against another unseen enemy, the economy, when the Great Depression hit.

And whereas most of the time’s literature reflected this landscape of confusion and despair, this world where “things fall apart” and nothing much makes sense, Gone with the Wind, a popular novel in all connotations of the word, brought an escape and the promise of optimism. It brought back the old message that had motivated the Western World (and America in particular) ever since Robinson Crusoe set foot on his famous fictional island: the enterprising individual can make it by force of his own willpower against anything Providence throws at him. Gone with the Wind infused new life into the old story of self-reliance.

To the Ashley Wilkes-like characters of modernism, that admit defeat in front of a world that stopped making sense and seek the lost order and symmetry in books and countless references (because that’s all they have left), Mitchell opposed the strength of Scarlett, who refuses to fall victim to the world, but models and bends it to her will. And I imagine people naturally liked this, because it offered them the illusion that it was possible to stand up to history, to stand up to the economy, to stand up to all the things they couldn’t control in their lives. It was possible to at least live through it all, and once it was over, make sure it never happened again.

And it’s this aspect of the book, besides the romance, that gave it its timeless appeal to audiences worldwide. People, especially people who experienced hardships first-hand, could connect to Scarlett’s story and aspire to her strength. And, to me at least, this is the major element that makes Gone with the Wind an important milestone in our culture even now, at its 75th anniversary. And, coming back to me, I suppose it’s the echoes of this message that comfort me when First World Problems strike and that put things into their proper context again.

Or, well, maybe it is just the comfort of a bad joke.

My Beef With the Wind

My mother handed me Gone With the Wind just before a family vacation when I was ten years old, almost eleven. She was desperate to satiate my appetite for new, “grown-up” reading material–this was the year of Jane Eyre, and later, of Pride and Prejudice, the year when I began to breeze through YA with such quick impatience that Gone With the Wind’s 1,000 plus pages were a welcome challenge.

I’ll never forget the feeling of immersing myself Mitchell’s epic. It was like being sucked into a vortex of adulthood, a completely new and fascinating universe. I curled up reading it at night when I was supposed to be asleep, with the door to the bathroom open for light. I sat in the back of my classroom buried in its chapters, ignoring my classmates’ preteen antics. Finishing those 1,000 pages became the consummate reading experience: troubling, enticing, absorbing, all-consuming. It cemented my love of the written word and of good storytelling. It became a vital part of my coming-of-age as a reader. I was too young to know what was approaching for any of the characters, and so my obsession with them took on an innocent urgency.

But before continue I with my raptures (and I could), I’ll address my giant beef with the novel, which of course, is everyone’s beef. The above paragraphs, the fact that the book was a rite of passage for me, the fact that I read it with fascination may have made something clear to you already: I’m white. And while it spun me upside-down with its artistic power, Gone With the Wind also troubles me because it’s a racist, revisionist novel in a society that’s still racist and revisionist.  To enjoy this novel, to consider it part of your coming of age, to be able to block out its politics, is to benefit from the privilege white people have in America–even if they’re committed anti-racists who think the book’s embedded propaganda is laughable.

Gone With the Wind is a ... problematic read.

To answer that question, I’ll go back to that first read. I wonder now why this aspect of the novel didn’t bother me more; my radical politics were already nascent and my favorite YA books that same year were all about the civil rights era. It’s likely because all the details in Scarlett’s world were utterly foreign, the hoop-skirts and the attendant rail-thin waists, the vast plantations. The selfishness of the heroine eclipsed the flaws and tomboyishness of her counterparts in tamer literature. Even more foreign to me was the book’s “backwards” view of history from what I’d accepted: the idea that the North was an aggressor and the South a victim in the civil war, and particularly that slaves were happy with the status-quo of being treated as subhuman chattel. I knew this was untrue.

I imagine the propagandist aspect of Mitchell’s masterpiece was part of the perverse interest it held. Just as Scarlett is an anti-heroine, the opposite of a morally upright March sister in Little Women, she is also on the wrong side of the war from those virtuous girls, and on the opposite side of most questions (like husband-stealing, for-instance, or seduction for financial ends). So of course she’s on the wrong side of slavery.

And yet. And  yet. Mitchell, through her words is able to compel the book’s readers to feel and experience life along with this woman, even as she spews bile about Yankees and former slaves, even as she contemplates hurting everyone around her, even as she makes terrible choices, cruel ones, self-destructive ones. We want to understand her motivations, we long for her to change her ways before it’s too late. We become invested in someone who is so different from us. And isn’t that one of the things that makes literature powerful and necessary?

So when my future daughter, or my niece, is ready to read the book, I will likely hand it to her, and I will talk to her before she reads it as my mom did for me. And I will probably hand her Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, too. And I hope that by the time she gets to Gone With the Wind, the world of Scarlett O’Hara will be even more foreign and strange and removed from reality not just to my daughter, but to our whole society.

Now sit back and welcome Katie Noah Gibson, a book blogger and all-around Great Person I had the pleasure of meeting in person on The Littlest Book Tour.  She’s going to share her perspective on an oft-overlooked character in GWTW.

Mammy: A Different Kind of Heroine

For my 14^th birthday, my friend James gave me a gorgeous hardback copy of Gone with the Wind – bound in red, encased in its own red-flowered white box. My mother promptly warned me about Scarlett O’Hara: “She’s not the kind of heroine you usually read about.”

I’m sure Mom wanted to save me from massive disappointment. You see, I was a good girl who loved reading about other good girls – Anne Shirley, Nancy Drew, Jo March, Laura Ingalls Wilder and many others. My heroines had a few flaws, but they managed to endear themselves to everyone around them, while solving mysteries, writing great books, staking a homestead claim in the Wild West, or even just finding the beauty in everyday life. Scarlett’s main aims, by contrast, are survival and selfish gain. As predicted, she made me furious (even while I admired her chutzpah and sheer force of will). But I fell in love with Mammy.

Mammy does not suffer fools gladly.

I know Mammy’s character is based on a problematic stereotype (even at 14 I could see that GWTW is fraught with racial politics at every turn). I know Scarlett often treats Mammy horribly, and I know she often has no choice but to grit her teeth and go along with Scarlett’s schemes. And Mitchell takes every opportunity to reinforce the image of Mammy as black, overweight and unattractive. But I think Mammy rises above the stereotype of her race and position with her intelligence, grit and compassion.

Mammy not only has a moral compass (which Scarlett lacks) and a powerful mixture of kindness and practicality (which allows her to take care of everyone) – she has backbone to spare. She’s one of only two characters (the other being Rhett) who can stand up to Scarlett, and she does it while taking care of Scarlett – and getting very few thanks for her efforts.  She may be a slave, with few rights and little autonomy, but she always has her own opinion, and she is wiser than any of her masters and mistresses.

Although Scarlett drives me nuts, I admire the way Mammy stands by her – throughout her journey from spoiled Southern belle to strong, independent (if still spoiled) woman.  She also cares for other members of Scarlett’s family – tending to various wounds and injuries, nursing Melanie back to health after childbirth, trying to comfort Rhett after Bonnie’s death. Scarlett’s prejudices and frequent quarrels with those around her never prevent Mammy from showing compassion to them.

Hattie McDaniel, who played Mammy so memorably in the film version of GWTW, was the first African-American actress to win an Oscar. I think she – and Mammy – richly deserved it.

What’s your take on Mammy?  Comment and enter to win a lovely first edition-style hardcover of Gone With the Wind!

Erin:  Why Margaret Mitchell?

Ellen F. Brown: Several years ago I was assigned by a magazine to write a profile of GWTW collector John Wiley, Jr. I’d never read GWTW and went into the interview skeptically. I came away a true believer. I was stunned to discover Mitchell won the Pulitzer, the National Book Award and was nominated for a Nobel. After finally sitting down to read GWTW, I wanted to learn more. I asked John to refer me to a history of the book, and he said there wasn’t one. We eventually decided to fill that gap in literary history.

Did your experience as a rare book dealer influence your writing or your book?

EFB: Absolutely. I am obsessed with the “history of the book”, a term used to describe the study of how books as we know them today have come to be and the role they play in our culture. I care about every facet of book production from the drafting of manuscripts to how bindings are applied. It was great fun putting my experience to good use on this project. I had to restrain myself at times—I originally envisioned an entire chapter on the dust jacket alone. I think that might have been a bit much for some people!

The cover of Ellen's gripping book. Comment to win!

What surprised you most about Peggy?

EFB: What an admirable woman she was. You would laugh if you saw the original proposal for A Bestseller’s Odyssey. I had described Mitchell as a hypochondriac and an eccentric—that’s the impression of her I had from earlier biographies. But, after reading thousands of her letters with my own two eyes, I came away amazed by how smart and talented she was. She had her flaws, but she was exceptionally bright and far more substantive than many people give her credit for.

What drove you crazy about her?

EFB: That she never wrote another book. She spent too much time obsessing over Gone With the Wind and making sure the rights were handled just so. I wish she had turned her business affairs over to an outside manager and that she had put her time to good use writing.

Can you speak to GWTW as a literary phenomenon?  Is it a feminist book? What about the “it’s too popular/trashy/romantic” debate?

EFB: I venture to say that anyone who questions GWTW’s status as literature has never read the book. Whether you like Mitchell’s story or not, it is beautifully written and an important part of our American literary tradition. Is it feminist? I’ve never been sure what that term means, but I would say probably so. Mitchell wrote about strong women and how they confront the challenges in their lives. They make sacrifices. They make mistakes. But, in the end, they get the job done. It’s a good message.

You’ve been traveling the country promoting your fabulousness.  What do fans tell you about how MM and GWTW changed their lives?

EFB: The GWTW fans are amazing. My favorite part of this entire experience has been talking with people about how Mitchell’s book has affected their lives. Hundreds of women have described reading GWTW in their teens and how it inspired them to confront challenges as they were growing up. I’m jealous that I didn’t have that experience. Earlier this week, a woman told me how a friend of hers from France had used GWTW as a guide to surviving Nazi occupation during WWII. Because of GWTW they knew how to hide the silver!

Anything you want to add?

EFB: It has been a privilege getting to know Margaret Mitchell these past few years. If my book accomplishes one thing I hope it offers people a new appreciation for her accomplishments. Mitchell was an incredible woman whose life is worthy of study and admiration.

Ellen F. Brown is an award-winning freelance writer. Her first book, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind: A Bestseller’s Odyssey from Atlanta to Hollywood, co-authored by John Wiley, Jr., offers a behind-the-scenes look at one of the most popular and controversial novels in publishing history. Publishers Weekly selected it as a top pick for spring 2011. She lives in Richmond, Virginia’s historic Fan District with her husband and two sons.

Tomorrow is Another Ending

I read Gone With the Wind for the first time the summer of eighth grade. It was a hot, sticky August, and the book was in a box filled with dusty tomes I’d inherited from a great-aunt. I’d flipped through a few pages, and the story line seemed more appealing than anything else, so I took it up to my room and flopped on the bed.

Inside Liz Michalski's inherited copy of Gone With the Wind

Aside from the meals my parents kept insisting upon, I don’t think I moved from that spot for the next 48 hours. I was obsessed with Scarlett, with her quick, crafty thinking, so different from the heroines in the books I usually read, and crazed with the tension between she and Rhett. I couldn’t turn the pages fast enough … until I came to the end. And then I couldn’t believe that was it. Where was the clear happily-ever-after? Where was the romantic, passionate reunion? What the hell was wrong with this author?

I badgered my mother over that ending so much during the next few days that the poor woman ‘invented’ a sequel. Mom wasn’t sure when it had been written, or by whom, but she remembered very clearly that it had a happy ending, one that she described in detail to me so that I would shut up and move on to the next book.

All these years later, I can’t remember a single other book in that box, but I can still recall the heartbroken, leaden feeling I had at that last page, the way I spent days imagining how shrewd Scarlett managed to win Rhett back, the way he finally realized how much she loved him, and their glorious reunion.

As a reader today, as much as I love HEAs (Happily Ever Afters), I find that the stories that stay with me the longest are the ones in which I get to work out what happens next for myself. The Time Traveller’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger, Possession by A S Byatt, The Brief History of the Dead by Kevin Brockmeier — all of these have haunting endings in part because the reader gets to imagine them.

As a writer, I wasn’t planning to end my novel ambiguously, but perhaps a small part of my eighth-grade self was looking over my shoulder as I wrote. Somewhere, another reader may be cursing my name as she struggles to envision her own happy ending for my characters. I’m okay with that. I thank Miss Margaret Mitchell for demonstrating that in literature, as in life, sometimes the most memorable journeys are those that end not with a closed door, but with another path.

Gone With the Chunksters

Yup. GWTW can feel this big.

I’m finally starting to pick up chunksters again; I suppose I have Erin Blakemore to thank for that. Admitting my relatively new ‘fear’ of chunksters during the Heroine Love extravaganza, along with my redeeming adoration of the Outlander series by Diana Gabaldon, has helped me actually consider them as a viable reading option once again. I still don’t pick them up all the time, but they are slowly making their way back into my reading rotation.

But really, who cares? I mean, was I really missing anything by not reading extremely long novels in the first place?

In the grand scheme of things, I suppose it doesn’t really matter. But the entire time I avoided chunksters, part of me missed them. I missed spending a week or more on one book, immersed in the place and time, living life with the characters. This feeling of something missing did not spring from my brain full-fledged, however, it grew from memorable experiences with long and wonderful books, beginning with Gone With the Wind.

I still remember the circumstances surrounding my first read of Gone With the Wind. Seventh grade, Christmas vacation. My English class had a contest each quarter to see who could read the most pages, and I was always vying for first place with a few other avid readers. I decided that over break I would read a Very. Long. Book. in order to pull ahead. What exactly led me to choosing Gone With the Wind in particular I’m not positive, but the experience was completely – pardon my pun – novel. The edition I borrowed from the library was well over 1,000 pages, maybe 1,100 and was perhaps three times longer than anything else I had ever read.

I lived with that book for nearly two weeks. I remember carting it around the house, reading in bed, attempting to balance it in the bath without dropping it in (not an easy feat with a book of that size). For the entirety of Christmas vacation I devoured Gone With the Wind. It was my first time diving into such a long, rich, detailed novel, and I savored every minute of it, not least the feeling of immense accomplishment that came from making my way through over 1,000 pages of love, war, and redemption.

Perhaps the thing that has stuck with me the most is how Mitchell opened my eyes to the reality of how different history can look to different people with her story of war, slavery, and reconstruction. She may have been an apologist for the South, but the idea that not everyone will take the same view of history was new to me, and without her taking on the Southern viewpoint, I would not have grasped that concept when I did. It may even be that Mitchell and this eye-opening experience deserve the credit for my ongoing love of history.

I may have Diana Gabaldon and Erin Blakemore to thank for reminding me that my life is richer with epic novels, but I owe a debt of gratitude to Margaret Mitchell for teaching me that lesson in the first place.

Maybe it is time for a reread.

Jen has been blogging at Devourer of Books for three years, but as been a ravenous reader for as long as she can remember. If she isn’t at work or reading and playing with her toddler, she is probably reading or scheming up yet another blog project to fill up all that extra time she doesn’t have. Jen is also the proprietor of Booklicity, a company dedicated to providing targeted blog publicity for books and authors.

“November is the most disagreeable month in the whole year,” said Margaret, standing at the window one dull afternoon, looking out at the frostbitten garden.

“That’s the reason I was born in it,” observed Jo pensively, quite unconscious of the blot on her nose.

Now that November is coming to an end, it’s time to celebrate the birthday of Louisa May Alcott, who was born on this day in 1832.  And so, you’re in for a treat…Kelly O’Connor McNees, author of The Lost Summer of Louisa May Alcott , is here to give her thoughts on the very human LMA.  Welcome, Kelly!

I have always loved Little Women, of course, but Little Women is not really what made me want to write a novel about Louisa May Alcott. If I had never read any other novels or stories written by Louisa, nor any of the books written about her, I probably would have gone on happily rereading Little Women each year around Christmastime and not thinking very much about the woman who created it.

But one day in the library I picked up a copy of Martha Saxton’s biography of Louisa May Alcott. It stirred something in me and suddenly I wanted to read everything in the Alcott solar system but Little Women. This includes dozens and dozens of stories, a few novels, and one piece of thinly disguised journalism about her experience as a nurse during the Civil War. Next, I turned to Louisa’s collected letters and journals and the biographies by Madeline Stern and John Matteson.

The narrative voice of Little Women is polished and reserved, a spinster aunt telling a group of children a cozy story in which she has no personal stake. But the voice and content of Louisa’s other work, not to mention her letters and journals, is immediate and vibrant. This writing and the biographies reveal her to have been a person of intense and changing states of mind, one who was, in turns, passionate, depressed, prickly, angry, manic, lonely, and full of good humor. In other words, Louisa May Alcott was a real person. And realizing that is what made me want to write a novel about her.

I could list the facts that usually scandalize and/or surprise fans of gentle-mannered Little Women, and there are plenty—Louisa wrote sensational tales under a pen name and was very much motivated by money; she wrote about love gone violently awry, stalkers, and illegitimate children, as well as the experience of opium, to which she became addicted after years of chronic pain—but a mere list, without the context that life, day in and out, provides, seems to me a boring exercise.

I was and am interested in the choices Louisa made each day in her attempt to cultivate a certain kind of life that was rare indeed for a woman in her time: A life of independence and fulfilling work. We know, looking back, that she was destined to become one of the most famous women in human history, but until, at age 35, she wrote the book that became a bestseller, she did not know what the future held. And, yet, she rose each day and wrote until her hand cramped, determined to persevere to publication—not to be lauded, but so that she could provide for her family. Where does that drive come from? What hopes and wounds resided in the heart of this real woman? That’s the question I wrote The Lost Summer of Louisa May Alcott to answer.

Kelly O’Connor McNees is a former editorial assistant and English teacher. Born and raised in Michigan, she has lived in New York, Rhode Island, and Ontario and now resides with her husband in Chicago. The Lost Summer of Louisa May Alcott is her first novel.