some questioned the -- wrote to publishers, right, did mary johnston really write these scenes.etimes it was expressed from readers with the i was surprised that a woman could write battle this way. so not necessarily doubt that you actually wrote it, but surprise that you had written it. margaret mitchell armed herself with a long list of books that she purportedly used to research writing "gone with the wind" because i think she knew that she might come under attack even though battle is perhaps a tenth of that. there's very little war margaret mitchell's story. but she had a long list of some of these very diaries that i'm talking about, other novels that i talk about in this book, histories that she read in preparation so that she had a kind of authenticity to her book. for the women who participated in it, they took this work quite seriously and claimed a kind of authority to write about the war. and the second point is just how expansive and accommodating the market was for these women that they found -- and i'm not saying every woman who ever wrote anything ever got it pu