Interest in Erotica
Mitchell began collecting erotica from book shops in New York City while in her twenties. She was flamboyant in 1925, as were her friends. The newlywed Marshes and their social group openly discussed "all forms of sexual expression". Mitchell developed an appreciation for the works of Southern writer, James Branch Cabell, and his 1919 classic, Jurgen, A Comedy of Justice. She also read books about sexology. She took particular interest in the case studies of Havelock Ellis, a British physician who studied human sexuality. During this period in which Mitchell was reading pornography and sexology, she was also researching and drafting Gone with the Wind.
Read more about this topic: Margaret Mitchell
Famous quotes containing the words interest in and/or interest:
“If a man walk in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer; but if he spends his whole day as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making earth bald before her time, he is esteemed an industrious and enterprising citizen. As if the town had no interest in its forests but to cut them down!”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Consider the difference between looking and staring. A look is voluntary; it is also mobile, rising and falling in intensity as its foci of interest are taken up and then exhausted. A stare has, essentially, the character of a compulsion; it is steady, unmodulated, “fixed.””
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)