When I travel, I always find time to get a bit of reading time in. Car trips, flights, and relaxing by a pool or on a beach afford ample time to read fantastic books.

While on my trip to Atlanta, I read only one book (probably since I was traveling there for a conference followed by a family reunion, but with a little sight seeing smashed in the middle). But that one book is perhaps the ultimate novel set in Atlanta, Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell. Before reading the book, I had seen the 1939 movie starring Clarke Gable and Vivien Leigh. Typically I prefer to read a book before seeing the movie, but in this instance it was practically impossible to make it this far in my life without having seen the movie. And while reading the book, I definitely pictured the stars in my head for their literary counterparts.

What I really appreciated about the novel was that it was very easy to identify with the characters, including the characters’ racial ideas and anti-North sentiments. I certainly don’t mean to say that I agreed with them, but rather that I can understand how they arrived at their particular point of view when their backgrounds and in their time period. And I think that we can probably all agree that the Reconstruction as carried out in the post-Lincoln era was an unmitigated disaster. Rather than bringing the country together as one, it instead contributed to ongoing racism and hostility. What Margaret Mitchell truly succeeded in doing was bringing the reader into the fold and feel the emotions that the characters felt, however strong or serious or silly those feelings may be.

Before reading this novel, I had read quite a lot of Jane Austen, and it was quite interesting to me to contrast Mitchell with Austen. In most, if not all, of Austen’s books, there is tension created between the romantic interests that is resolved by the end with the characters ultimately falling in love and ending up together. In Gone with the Wind, the tension is continued throughout the entirety of the novel,and ultimately never resolved. Throughout the story, the reader knows or can guess at Rhett and Scarlett’s true feelings, and the missed connection is frustrating but truly the only possible ending that would feel authentic.

It was a bit of a happy coincidence that I had downloaded Gone with the Wind on my Kindle shortly before my trip to Atlanta, but it was a perfect fit, considering that so much of the story takes place in Atlanta. I very much liked the linkage between the place I was visiting and the setting of my novel.