Books Unveil Secrets of Their Own
Posted on October 31, 2025
A friend told me years ago that when you get the first copy of a book you’ve just published, you should hold onto the moment tightly because “it’s special and fleeting.”
So true.
And then the first outside comments arrive. Among them, for me, is an email from a person I didn’t know, John Wiley, author of two books about Margaret Mitchell. John wrote to tell me that in fact, my grandmother’s aunt Frances Scarlett Beach had sent a generous letter to Mitchell in 1936, after the publication of Gone with the Wind—whose central character bears our family name, Scarlett. John had found a copy of Mrs. Beach’s letter to Mitchell in an archive. Contrary to what I’d grown up hearing from my family, Mrs. Beach was something of a fan of Mitchell.
“I think Scarlett O’Hara was a wonderful character,” Frances Beach wrote, “but she isn’t the type of person we would like to claim for an ancestress.” Mrs. Beach clearly did not burn her correspondence with Mitchell—as I’d always been told—but treasured it. (My book includes Mitchell’s reply to Beach, another generous bit of correspondence.)
And so it goes. I wish I’d known about John Wiley’s discovery but am glad he was generous enough to share it with me. May the discoveries continue.
The front cover of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind by John Wiley, Jr. and Ellen F. Brown