Romance Archives - The Gale Review

When Fiction Becomes History: How Gone with the Wind Shaped America’s Memory of the Civil War

November 10, 2026 by Gale Review Team

Vivian Leigh and Hatti McDaniel in Gone with the Wind

Gale is thrilled to run a competition with Nazarbayev Intellectual Schools, Kazakhstan, which gives students at schools within the group the chance to research and write about a topic of interest – and potentially get their work published! Students entering the competition make use of resources in Gale Reference Complete: Schools Edition – Ultimate. Below is the 2026 winner – congratulations Gulsezim Maratkyzy!

| By Gulsezim Maratkyzy, Grade 11 Student at NIS Shymkent |

Some history is written by historians. But the history people remember is often written by storytellers. In 1936, Margaret Mitchell published Gone with the Wind, a love story set in the American South during the Civil War (1861–1865), and in 1939 it became a film. Adjusted for inflation, that film is still the highest-grossing movie ever made, and the novel became America’s best-selling book of the twentieth century (Walton, 2022). For millions, this romance did not simply describe the past. Quietly, it replaced it.

In this blog post, I will use Gale databases to explore how Gone with the Wind shaped the way Americans remember the Civil War, tracing where the “Lost Cause” myth came from, how the novel and film presented it, and why so many people believed it. My argument is simple: the story did not invent this myth, but it gave it its most powerful form.

An Overview of the Romantic Period using The Times Literary Supplement Historical Archive

October 3, 2023April 18, 2023 by Gale Ambassadors

|By India Marriott, Gale Ambassador at the University of Nottingham|

The Romantic period describes an artistic, literary, musical and intellectual movement that emerged throughout Europe at the close of the eighteenth century and moving into the nineteenth century. The Romantic period came as a response to the preceding ‘Age of Enlightenment’, moving away from rational individualism towards a more ‘romantic’ view of the world. Furthermore, many critics have pinpointed the Romantic period as a direct result of the ideals of the French Revolution that emerged at this time, allowing for further revolt against the aristocratic social and political norms of the Enlightenment era.

Romanticism places significance on imagination, emotion, freedom, and individualisation, in addition to suspicion of science and industrialisation post-Enlightenment. Furthermore, Romanticism places an importance on the power of nature and the natural world, which resulted in the creation of the concept of the Sublime, which I will explore further within this article.

How are Female Protagonists Presented in Erotic Literature?

October 3, 2023March 28, 2023 by Gale Ambassadors

Montage of images from this post of erotic literature

│By Grace Pashley, Gale Ambassador at the University of Birmingham│

Erotic literature and the representation of human sexuality has been around for thousands of years, whether that be the erotic lyric poems of Sappho of Lesbos or the highly commercialised Fifty Shades of Grey. Embracing one’s sexuality and authentically representing human experience has been and continues to be a contentious topic in the modern day. The Private Case from the British Library, one of the collections in Gale’s Sex and Sexuality, Sixteenth to Twentieth Century archive, brings to light erotic printed books which were previously deemed too deviant and morally corrupt to be available to the general public in the British Museum Library. Whilst The Private Case from the British Library is now a historical collection which is no longer updated, this historical archive provides readers with an insight into the realities of sexuality, desire and contemporary attitudes around sex at the time that these books were produced.

Despite the benefits of uncovering the perceived, or potentially true, realities of intimacy in a period when sexual desire was condemned and criminalised, we must remember that much of the erotic literature is written by men for men. The representation of women in erotic literature is often limited as women are objectified by the male gaze, and not able to voice their own thoughts about their sexual encounters. Whilst objectified, women are still represented as individuals who enjoy sexual encounters, but usually only in service of men, and have little to no agency in these sexual encounters. Yet, whilst it’s important to recognise the male gaze and its impact on how women and their sexual desire is portrayed, The Private Case from the British Library is able to provide researchers with an unabashedly revealing depiction of human sexuality.