Margaret Mitchell (“Gone With the Wind”) had two noted personalities; used multiple names; had both excellent and poor memory, as in multiple personality.

“She herself spoke of having two personalities—not the least fascinating aspect of her life—but whether Margaret Good or Peggy Mean, her life never lost its edge for me,” says her biographer in his Preface (1, p. xi).

In 1921, writing about her contrasting moods and attitudes, which may have changed too abruptly to be bipolar moodswings, Margaret Mitchell says, “After I’ve cut loose on a grand ‘emotional spree,’ as Doc Leslie calls ‘em, and hated somebody gloriously for a couple of hours—and the reaction hits me—it’s like another Margaret coming to the surface. I just don’t care—nothing seems to matter. My reason can plead with my lethargic second self…” (1, p. 112).

“…her old divided self, the good, chaste Margaret, battling the hell-raising Peggy…” (1, p. 119).

“For the author of Gone with the Wind—a.k.a. Margaret Munnerlyn Mitchell, Margaret MacKenzie Mitchell, Peggy Mitchell, Mrs. B. K. Upshaw, Peggy Mitchell Upshaw, P.M.M., Peggy Mitchell Marsh, Mrs. John R. Marsh, and M.M.M.M.—names and naming constituted a fundamental aspect of her identity [multiple identities?]. She also used names as dress, costume, or disguise to suggest a different persona or variation on her identity [multiple identities?]. For all her playing with different names, she did not use them casually” (1, p. 262). (Search “pseudonyms” for relevant past posts.)

“She harbored a secret wish to practice neurology and psychology, and she boasted often of her skill in psychoanalyzing her companions. She read psychology and psychoanalytic theory as avidly as some people read novels and romances…In this context, her correspondence with Dr. Hervey Cleckley acquires special significance, and to no one did she reveal more of Scarlett O’Hara’s flaws as a personality…” (1, p. 256).

Margaret Mitchell wrote to Dr. Cleckley to agree with the diagnosis he had made in his book The Mask of Sanity (1941), in which he had discussed Scarlett as one of the notable psychopaths in literature.

Mitchell (1900-1949), who died in an auto accident, did not live to read The Three Faces of Eve by Corbett H. Thigpen and Hervey M. Cleckley (1957) or to see the 1957 Oscar-winning film based on this true-life case of multiple personality.

The patient, Christine "Chris" Costner Sizemore (April 4, 1927 – July 24, 2016), was later found by another doctor to have about twenty-two personalities. (It is typical in cases of multiple personality to find only two or three personalities at first, but later to find more.) She was cured.

Both Excellent and Poor Memory

“For a person who took great pride in her memory and who possessed truly phenomenal powers of recall, Mitchell provided the fuzziest and most conflicting recollections of the chronology of her novel-writing when she reconstructed that time afterward” (1, p. 228). In different interviews, she estimated the time it took her to write Gone With the Wind as one, three, or ten years.

Search “absent-minded” in this blog for past posts regarding other writers who have this puzzling combination of both excellent and poor memory, which may be seen in people with multiple personality.

1. Darden Asbury Pyron. Southern Daughter: The Life of Margaret Mitchell. New York, Oxford University Press, 1991.