Ashley calls his own time "a dusk of the gods," and that's when Scarlett replies, "For Heaven's sake, Ashley Wilkes! Don't stand there talking nonsense at me." To patch a crack in the attic, she commandeers a bit of worthless Confederate money on which someone has written a moony, patriotic poem, and when Melanie protests over the misuse of this "pledge of a nation that's passed away," she snaps "Oh, Melly, don't be sentimental!" Mitchell (disapprovingly) tells us that Scarlett "had never stood starry eyed when the Stars and Bars ran up a pole or felt cold chills when 'Dixie' sounded." Without Scarlett's ruthless practicality and her almost total lack of redeeming qualities, "Gone With the Wind" would be unreadable. Mitchell is said to have considered Melanie to be the heroine of her novel, so it's not quite clear whether she ever realized that the only stroke of genius that could ever be attributed to her was her decision to write a historical romance with an entirely unromantic antiheroine at its center.

One of the finest evaluations of Mitchell ever written is Claudia Roth Pierpont's biographical essay in "Passionate Minds: Women Rewriting the World." In it, Pierpont astutely points out that the only slave on Tara who isn't pointedly described as "shining black" is a woman we're told is part Indian. Randall rightly complains that "Gone With the Wind" casts an enormous fact of plantation life -- the race-mixing brought about by white masters' rape of female slaves -- into obscurity. (The Mitchell Trust has cemented this blindness by prohibiting depictions of miscegenation in all authorized sequels.) And yet, as Pierpont observes, the use of pretty stories to paper over ugly truths was a tradition in the South long before Margaret Mitchell ever put pen to paper.

Pierpont writes that even before the Civil War, the Waverly novels of Sir Walter Scott, as well as his "Ivanhoe," offered Southerners "a blueprint and a benediction for a society already divided into landed fiefdoms and fully regulated by caste" in the doomed Scottish clans of Scott's phenomenally popular sagas. Taking Scott's "idyll of sentimental feudalism" as their inspiration, Southerners reimagined their society to "transform the surface appearance of a brutal and retarded economic system into a fancy dress theatrical." (Even the burning of crosses was lifted from the Scott novel "The Lady of the Lake.") In fact, the very habit of lamenting a long-lost and far more gracious way of life actually predated the war. "Southerners who were so inclined yearned for the brighter paradise before the Revolution," Pierpoint writes.

So if the "twilight of a nobility" nostalgia detectable in Judge Pannell's order has been picked up from the likes of Ashley Wilkes, Ashley himself learned it before the Confederacy even existed. No wonder many of America's best writers have come from the South -- it's our most literary region, a place where books have profoundly shaped people's sense of both who they are and what their lives mean for centuries. A book about the South, "Uncle Tom's Cabin," helped to trigger the Civil War, and in 1936 "Gone With the Wind," as one wag put it, won the peace -- and in many cases has replaced actual history in its readers' minds. Considering this, the claims of copyright law seem dwarfed by the imperative of historical truth. "Mitchell's characters long ago burst through the restraints of their form and, like folk- or fairy-tale figures, passed directly into mainstream consciousness," writes Pierpont. No wonder, then, that Randall was shocked to learn that she hadn't the right to pen a variation on Mitchell's yarn in the venerable tradition of folklorists worldwide.

Practically, we can side with law professor Lawrence Lessig, who in an April 30 editorial in the New York Times, urged Congress to stop its practice of extending copyright protection long past the death of a work's author. It's true that, whatever the letter of the law, "Gone With the Wind" is more than just a work of fiction and that, whatever Judge Pannell says, Mitchell's novel has become a kind of history, in accord with the deeply mythologized sense the South has of itself. That doesn't mean that "The Wind Done Gone" will find much of an audience even if Randall's publisher ends up being allowed to freely distribute it. Randall's book may be righteous, and it may have the truth on its side, but when it comes to the South, it's always the best story that wins.

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"