Vivien Leigh friendship developed after he congratulated her on her performance. Olivier and Leigh began an affair while acting as lovers in "Fire Over England" (1937), but Olivier was still married to actress Jill Esmond. During this period, Leigh read the Margaret Mitchell novel "Gone with the Wind" and instructed her American agent to recommend her to David O. Selznick, who was planning a film version. She remarked to a journalist, "I've cast myself as Scarlett O'Hara", and "The Observer" film critic C. A. Lejeune recalled a conversation of the same period in which Leigh "stunned us all" with the assertion that
Gone with the Wind (novel) because it is thought to contain some degree of pornography. Slavery in "Gone with the Wind" is a backdrop to a story that is essentially about other things. Southern plantation fiction (also known as Anti-Tom literature, in reference to reactions to Harriet Beecher Stowe's anti-slavery novel, "Uncle Tom's Cabin" of 1852) from the mid-19th century, culminating in "Gone With the Wind", is written from the perspective and values of the slaveholder and tends to present slaves as docile and happy. The characters in the novel are organized into two basic groups along class lines: the white planter class, such as