She's Becky Sharp with a Southern drawl, an irreverent, amoral modern heroine with virtually no heart. Scarlett O'Hara is a 19th century
belle who epitomises the ethos of survival.

At the centre of an epic story of Civil War, which pitches the old conservative plantation-owning values of the American South against the brash, opportunistic modernism of the North, Scarlett is forced to cast aside her frilly frocks and parasols to fight for family, home and her own life.

She turns her lily-white hands to picking cotton, runs the gauntlet of a battlefield, delivers a baby, kills a potential rapist, sells herself to save her home and feed her family, runs two businesses and has three children of her own. In Margaret Mitchell's sweeping 1,000-page novel of 1936 – which won the Pulitzer Prize the following year – Scarlett spends half her life in love with Ashley Wilkes, who represents the slowness and refinement of the ancien regime.

When she can't have him and her family falls on hard times, she sets out to woo the cynical and diabolically dashing Rhett Butler, who has his sights set firmly on the future. The men represent two very different views of the United States. Scarlett hitches her buggy to the future – but can't help glancing backwards. Too late she realises she has lost the only man she ever properly loved. Trevor Nunn says he hopes fervently that his version of GWTW for the theatre will lead audiences back to the extraordinary book. Nunn's previous adaptations of epic novels, Nicholas Nickleby and Les Miserables, encouraged booming sales of the novels.

These millions of new readers of Gone With The Wind (28 million copies already sold worldwide) will find a story to get lost in, a tale that captures the spirit of a long-lost age. The closely-interwoven lives of its characters are drawn against the backdrop of political and social change.

Mitchell was born in Atlanta, Georgia in 1900,
the daughter of a lawyer
and a suffragist.

Her childhood was spent on the laps of the Civil War veterans and relatives of her mother's who lived through the upheavals of those times.

When her mother died in 1918, Margaret dropped out of college to take over the family household, but later defied convention by becoming a columnist at
her local newspaper, the Atlanta Journal.

She married, divorced, and wed again – this time to John Marsh, who had been best man at her first wedding. During the 1920s, highlights of her career included interviewing Rudoph Valentino and writing profiles of Civil War generals. Her journalistic pen-portraits bore the mark of her sparkling personality. It's believed by scholars that research for these pieces led her to write Gone With The Wind. The seven-year "grand oeuvre" is thought to have started while Mitchell was at home recovering from a broken ankle. She read most of the history books in the local library and Marsh suggested that she write the next one herself. She got out an old Remington typewriter and began tapping away for her own amusement, hiding the brown envelopes of the secret manuscript in a closet, under the sofa or beneath the bed when friends visited.

Scarlett was originally called Pansy O'Hara and the plantation homestead Tara started out as Fontenoy Hall. Possible titles for the book included Tote the Weary Load and Tomorrow Is Another Day, taken from the novel's final line.

She wrote the last chapter first, skipped between episodes, gave the pages to Marsh to proof-read, and when the work was finished, lost interest in it. Mitchell said her characters were not based on real people, but scholars later spotted, for instance, that Rhett Butler bears more than a passing resemblance to her first husband Red Upshaw.

Upshaw's final words are even said to have been: "My dear, I don't give a damn."

The "buried" epic resurfaced after the publisher Harold Latham visited Atlanta in 1935.

He was scouting the South for new writers, and Mitchell showed him around the city. Latham fell for Margaret's beauty and wit, and said that if she ever wrote a book, he should be the first to see it.

It's the stuff of legend that, later the same day, a bitchy female friend of Mitchell's said within her earshot that Margaret was "far too silly" to write a book. Furious, she dug out her fading manuscript and sped across town to find Latham.

She later regretted her impulsiveness and asked for it back. But the publisher had already read enough to know it was a blockbuster.

Victor Fleming's film of the book was released in 1939, and won 10 Oscars. Margaret Mitchell died in 1949, after being hit by a car. GWTW was thought to have been her only novel until a manuscript called Lost Laysen, a romance set in the South Pacific, was found in the 1990s among letters written to an old beau, and published.