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Martha Mitchell was the gabby wife of a certain Washington bigwig long ago.

You're thinking of Margaret Mitchell.

I respect Florence King's opinion, but I don't like the book. I wrote my thesis analyzing a Civil War era plantation family and their environment in detail -- and the South was not like that. Mitchell's book details a fantasy of what Southerners -- in the midst of a depression that hit them very hard -- created as a myth of their glorious past.

She does touch on the truth in her characterizations, because many Southern women were as ruthless as Scarlett . . . but most were less obvious and more effective. And many of the other characters hit Southern types off very well -- almost as well as King did in her Southern Ladies and Gentlemen.