It's romantic."But doesn't it cloud the rest of the world's perceptions about Southern women?No, she thinks we do that all by ourselves. "Of course, it's ridiculous when some ignoramus comes down here and thinks every woman is a Scarlett or a Melanie - or a Mammy, for that matter," she says. "The whole Southern myth is just some benighted romantic version that's not accurate. All that stuff about a noble cause that wasn't very noble at all. And that people actually use Gone With the Wind as a source book for information on things Southern - particularly female things Southern.Still, I've been known to get a little overwrought on this particular subject.

So I decided to seek a second opinion; I called up a tough, wise- cracking journalist type, one of the most clear-eyed and outspoken Southern women I know. I mentioned The Book and waited for her to light into it.And waited.Finally, in hushed tones, she whispered, "I read it for the first time when I was 13 years old I stayed up all night to finish it. When my sister complained about having the light on, I went into the bathroom and lined the tub with towels and lay there all night reading. I sobbed my heart out."Well, OK, there's no accounting for adolescent hormones Had she looked at the book recently?More reverent tones. "I re-read it as an adult," she said, "and I was just as thrilled."And does she think the book accurately portrays the South? Hardly the point, she says "It's good storytelling. Nor, judging by the left-overs, did anybody else.A friend who gave up cooking for her family in favour of the joys of take-out, none the less waxes sadly eloquent over what she sees as "the guilt of the modern Southern woman over her failure to cook for the dead". The belle myth has been around for a long time, but it is clearly The Book - Gone With the Wind - that cemented the image in the public's mind.

Literary merit aside (I shouldn't even mention the English professor I had in college who dismissed the work as "mere historical fiction" and Scarlett O'Hara as "a third-rate Becky Sharp"), it continues to astound and frustrate me that generations of Southern women have been defined by a ruthless green-eyed mankiller who never existed. In the small north Georgia town where she grew up, this woman says, "a person simply didn't die without my mother taking a ham or a cake or a casserole to the family."It's naive to ask what fuels this Southern woman business, in or out of the kitchen We all know the answer. Then I called my mother."I need your recipe for pecan pie.""Who is this?""I'm serious. I need to make a pecan pie.""Don't you have a cook book?"The really hard part was finding the pecans, which are considerably less plentiful in California than in Georgia.