Editing Margaret Mitchell (section)

===The South of ''Gone with the Wind''===
While "the South" exists as a geographical region of the United States, it is also said to exist as "a place of the imagination" of writers.<ref>Cassuto, Leonard, Claire Virginia Eby and Benjamin Reiss. ''The Cambridge History of the American Novel''. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2011. p. 236. {{ISBN|978-0-521-89907-9}}</ref> An image of "the South" was fixed in Mitchell's imagination when at six years old her mother took her on a buggy tour through ruined plantations and "Sherman's sentinels",<ref name=autogenerated8 /> the brick and stone chimneys that remained after [[William Tecumseh Sherman]]'s "[[Sherman's March to the Sea|March]] and torch" through Georgia.<ref>Caudill, Edward and Paul Ashdown. ''Sherman's March in Myth and Memory''. Lanaham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2008. p. 179. {{ISBN|978-0-7425-5027-8}}</ref> Mitchell would later recall what her mother had said to her:

<blockquote>She talked about the world those people had lived in, such a secure world, and how it had exploded beneath them. And she told me that my world was going to explode under me, someday, and God help me if I didn't have some weapon to meet the new world.<ref name=autogenerated8>Felder, Deborah G. ''A Century of Women: the most influential events in twentieth-century women's history''. New York, NY: Citadel Press, 1999. p. 158. {{ISBN|0-8065-2526-6}}</ref></blockquote>

From an imagination cultivated in her youth, Margaret Mitchell's defensive weapon would become her writing.<ref name=autogenerated8 />

Mitchell said she heard Civil War stories from her relatives when she was growing up:

<blockquote>On Sunday afternoons when we went calling on the older generation of relatives, those who had been active in the [[1860s|Sixties]], I sat on the bony knees of veterans and the fat slippery laps of great aunts and heard them talk.<ref>Martin, Sara Hines. ''More Than Petticoats: remarkable Georgia women''. Guilford, CT: The Global Pequot Press, 2003. p. 161. {{ISBN|0-7627-1270-8}}</ref></blockquote>

On summer vacations, she visited her maternal great-aunts, Mary Ellen ("Mamie") Fitzgerald and Sarah ("Sis") Fitzgerald, who still lived at her great-grandparents' plantation home in [[Jonesboro, Georgia|Jonesboro]].<ref>Historical Jonesboro/Clayton County, Inc., ''Jonesboro-Historical Jonesboro'', p. 113.</ref> Mamie had been twenty-one years old and Sis was thirteen when the Civil War began.<ref>[http://www.fayettecem.tiffman.com/F.htm Fayetteville City Cemetery] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120406180714/http://www.fayettecem.tiffman.com/F.htm |date=April 6, 2012 }}. Retrieved December 20, 2011.</ref>