Southern Daughter: The Life of Margaret Mitchell.

GONE with the Wind doesn't have much of a reputation these days, though it still sells steadily. It was never approved by the intellectuals; its politics have long been viewed as incorrect; and besides, the move version stole--while muting--much of its thunder. Yet the enduring presence of the book implies something about its undeniable strength.

But now the world's best-seller lists register the coup of the Mitchell estate, which in commissioning a sequel packaged a mega-bucks smash that has caused speculation about a prequel and a sequel to the sequel. It's enough to shake one's faith in the people's right to choose, the free market, and all that.

What's the fuss about, anyway? Alexandra Riply, who word-processed this sequel, has only demonstrated the powr of the original, for the result of her efforts is a tour de faiblesse of ineptitude, incoherence, and unimaginative droning. Margaret Mitchell, by contrast, has never looked so good. Miss Ripley's bodacious bodice rip-off actually contains some literal bodice-ripping, but there's a strange lack of energy, even after all the soft corn and soft porn.

"Now I'm going to cut the laces on your corset, Scarlett [because we are nearly drowned beneath a capsized sloop during a storm]. You can't breathe easily in that cage. Just hold still so I don't cut your skin." There was an embarrassing intimacy in the movement of his hands under the sweater, tearing open her basque and her shirtwaist. It had been years since he had last put his hands on her body.

What is missing from Miss Ripley's two-and-a-half-pound doorstop, besides brains, heart, and guts, in any historical context, any psychological insight, any irony or tension. No amount of breast-heaving can compensate for the lack of something like this, from the original:

Lying in the pitiless sun, shoulder to shoulder, head to feet, were hundreds of wounded men, lining the tracks, the sidewalks, stretched out in endless rows under the car shed. Some lay stiff and still but many writhed under the hot sun, moaning. Everywhere, swarms of flies hovered over the men, crawling and buzzing in their faces, everywhere was blood, dirty bandages, groans, screamed curses of pain as stretcher bearers lifted men. The smell of sweat, of blood, of unwashed bodies, of excrement rose up in the waves of blistering heat until the fetid stench almost nauseated her.

. . . She shrank back, clapping her hand to her mouth feeling that she was going to vomit. She couldn't go on.

How's that for moonlight and magnolias? Scarlett's experience of the soldiers' suffering (besides anticipating my own reaction to Miss Ripley's Scarlett) is a complex denial of that reality, for she wants to take Dr. Meade away from his plain duty so he can deliver Melanie's baby. And the female struggle of Melanie and Scarlett and Prissy with the trauma of birth is in deliberate and maximum structural contrast with the male experience of war.

Scarlett has none of the epic power of Gone with the Wind--neither the potency of obsessive love nor the enveloping action of war, destruction, and rebirth. Miss Mitchell's Scarlett O'Hara was christened on the same day as Atlanta: she is a symbol of that city's rise from the ashes as it (and she) mimicked the values and behavior of those who had destroyed it. She can no more be lifted from the context that Captain Ahab could be rehabilitated as an environmental lobbyist.

No, anyone interested in Scarlett ought to be reading Professor Pryon's biography of her creator instead. Actually, Peggy Mitchell is even more interesting than Scarlett-she was much more admirable, even more conflicted, and at least as brave.

Pryon's Southern Daughter easily eclipses the other boks on Miss Mitchell--it is the most elaborate and penetrating treatment of the woman and her novel that we are likely to have. Pryon pushes hard, from the inside and the outside, to clarify Margaret Mitchell's tense existence. Her deeply ambivalent clash with her strong mother, never resolved, led both to her tomboyish childhood and to her Grande Dame behavior during and after the Second World War. Her inner conflicts drove her to act both as a flirtatious flapper and as a tough feminist in the man's world of journalism. Peggy Mitchell was a strong person who was always sick, and whose happy second marriage was to a man who was chronically ill.

But Pryon's explorations are social and easthetic as well as psychological. No one has ever shown so clearly just why and how Gone with the Wind was written not as a plantation novel but as a refutation of cozy cliches. Nor has anyone else to my knowledge ever demonstrated so vivdly what Pryon calls Scarlett O'Hara's perversion"--she is a bad daughter, a dreadful mother, and a psychically twisted wife to three different men she does not love. Pryon's drawing of the link between Miss Mitchell's mother and Rhett Butler is a convincing insight that perhaps explains something of the power of Gone with the Wind.

And I would add that though Pryon's is not a perfect book-too many misprints, too many repetitions of the word "gender"--his work is a moving recreation of the author's ordeals, and of her environment. Margaret Mitchell's father was co-founder and president of the Atlanta Historical Society; she herself saw grizzled old rebels marching on April 26, Confederate Memorial Day. Though there is no false sentiment about the Lost Cause in Gone with the Wind, there is regional memory, even national history:

Why, four months ago Dalton, Resaca, Kennesaw Mountain had been to her only names of places on the railroad. Now they were battles, battles desperately, vainly fought as Johnston fell back towards Atlanta. And now, Peachtree Creek, Decatur, Ezra Church, and Utoy Creek were no longer pleasant names of pleasant places. . . . And the lazy streams were redder now than ever Georgia clay could make them. Peachtree Creek was crimson, so they said, after the Yankees crossed it.

The historical dimension is the armature of Gone with the Wind; without it, the personal emotions fade. In Scarlett, there's nothing at stake, nor is there, come to think of it, any writing either. Miss Ripley's "book" is a non-event and a waste-disposal problem, no more--but cheer up, there's always next time. There's a world of readers--make that consumers--waiting with credit cards poised to see Belle Watling conquer London society, etc., all wrapped up with international tie-ins anda TV mini-series.

Mr. Tate teaches English literature at Dowling College in Oakdale, N.Y.