New edition of ‘Gone With the Wind’ features essay claiming book is ‘white supremacist’

The Telegraph reports that the publisher specifically hired a white writer, Philippa Gregory, to pen an essay to accompany the trigger warning and detail the book's "white supremacist" elements to avoid hiring a black writer and giving them the "emotional labour" of such a task.

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Gone With The Wind is set before and during the American Civil War and tracks protagonist Scarlett O'Hara, the daughter of a Southern plantation owner, as she navigates the tumult of her times. The story begins with O'Hara living in relative comfort and excess as she considers a variety of men to be her suitors but her lifestyle radically changes through the course of the war.

The book's publisher now warns readers that they could find the way Mitchell depicted the South as "racist" and "'hurtful or indeed harmful" and that the reader will encounter "shocking elements."

The warning reads, "Gone with the Wind is a novel which includes problematic elements including the romanticisation of a shocking era in our history and the horrors of slavery."

"The novel includes the representation of unacceptable practices, racist and stereotypical depictions and troubling themes, characterisation, language and imagery," the warning continues.

The publisher notes that the "book remains true to the original in every way and is reflective of the language and period in which it was originally written" and they believe "changing the text to reflect today’s world would undermine the authenticity of the original, so has chosen to leave the text in its entirety."

"This does not, however, constitute an endorsement of the characterisation, content or language used," the publisher adds.

After the trigger warning, an essay appears by Philippa Gregory, The Other Boleyn Girl author, to tell the reader that Mitchell wrote her novel as an endorsement of the "Lost Cause" view of the American Confederacy, which is to say that the South was fighting for freedom from the Union under justified reasons.

Gregory said the book, "defends racism" and "glamorises and preaches white supremacy."

Gone With The Wind was adapted to the iconic film of the same name in 1939 and starred Clark Gable as Rhett Butler, the man O'Hara eventually falls in love with, and Vivien Leigh as Scarlett O'Hara.

According to the Daily Mail, "a newly-discovered script from Gone With The Wind revealed the bitter fallout over the presentation of slavery in the controversial 1939 blockbuster."

Revelations from the script reveal that in alternate drafts of the film adaptation, slavery was depicted with much more realism and brutality than what ended up in the finished picture.

The James Bond novels by acclaimed author Ian Fleming were recently censored after Ian Fleming Publications Ltd hired sensitivity readers to review the material and make suggestions to language, especially around racial descriptions of characters. Earlier in February, Telegraph published details on the works of beloved children's author Roald Dahl being censored by their publisher, Puffin, after sensitivity readers deemed some of the language offense to modern readers. After backlash, including from PEN America, the publisher announced they were releasing uncensored "classic texts" of Dahl's body of work.