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) the two ethnic groups are not equivalent in the ethnic hierarchy of the novel. The novel has been criticized for promoting plantation values. Mitchell biographer Marianne Walker, author of "Margaret Mitchell and John Marsh: The Love Story Behind Gone with the Wind", believes that those who attack the book on these grounds have not read it. She said that the popular 1939 film "promotes a false notion of the Old South". Mitchell was not involved in the screenplay or film production. James Loewen, author of "Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong", says this novel