If the 3-year old Margaret Mitchell had not allowed her nightgown to catch fire, there might never have been a 'Gone with the Wind'. For although she emerged unhurt, the shock had somehow exposed a rebel streak that would stay with her for life.
This did not keep her from espousing the deep race-prejudice of old Atlanta - for example, refusing to share a classroom with a black student, which some of her critics still hold against her. But she resisted the conventional coming-out routine for young ladies, forming a gang called the Rebel Debutantes and boasting "we're coming down off the auction block" (possibly an ironic reference to slave-auctions).
Having lost a fiancée in the trenches, she soon married her first husband, easily recognisable as Rhett Butler, who didn't last long, and then his total opposite, a kind and gentle person who turned out to be the perfect sounding-board when she got so deep into Gone with the Wind that she needed a second opinion.
The statement that "She clearly had the great plot outline" is at odds with my understanding that she could only deliver a mass of anecdotes that she had heard as an only-child in a house full of aunts and great-aunts who had lived through the war in Atlanta (furnishing her with much insight into the war's impact on women.) Meanwhile it was a sympathetic publisher who had to sort them into a proper sequence.
Nobody was more astonished than Mitchell herself when the book became a runaway best-seller at a hefty three dollars in the depth of the Depression. But the black community was quick to criticise what they saw as a romanticising of the cotton days - as many race-lobbyists still do. "Not characters but caricatures" says Afro-American historian Elizabeth West - an accusation Mitchell had faced in her own time, while protesting that she had endowed many of the slaves with admirable qualities. Another historian, Molly Haskell, says "People who believed in integration didn't necessarily believe in equality. It makes us very uncomfortable today." (Rather a partisan claim, I would suggest.) And playwright Pearl Cleage might convince more sceptics if she could get by without repeating "human being".
