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tHE STORIES BEHIND THE STORIES

By Audra D.S. Burch McClatchy Newspapers

Former journalist Peggy Marsh had been quietly working on her novel for more than a decade when she was discovered by a ­publisher who was scouring the South for new authors. Starring a heroine named Pansy O’Hara, Marsh’s manuscript was a theatrical, longing ode to the lost, pre-Civil War era in the Deep South. Its working title: Tomorrow Is Another Day.

By the time the novel was published a year later, in 1936, Pansy had become Scarlett, and Marsh had reverted to her maiden name, Margaret Mitchell. And her title famously had been transformed into the more poignant Gone With the Wind.

This is just one of the literary ­morsels ­offered in Who the Hell Is Pansy O’Hara? (Penguin, $13), a ­compilation of the little-known back stories behind 50 of the world’s most famous books.

”When you understand the book’s history or something about the author or what influenced his or her work, you can’t help but have a finer appreciation for the book, for the art work,“ Chris Sheedy, the Australian who wrote Who the Hell ...? with his wife, Jenny Bond, says from their home in Sydney. ”We were looking for wonderful pieces of information that told us something more.“

So free-lance journalists Bond and Sheedy, both 37, set out to write a book about books, to unveil shadowed truths by journeying through the authors’ minds, lives, loves and inspirations. A broader knowledge of an author, they say, makes for a richer reading experience.

Among the works they investigated: Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, The Hound of the Baskervilles by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway, The Cat in the Hat by Dr. Seuss, The Godfather by Mario Puzo, The Color Purple by Alice Walker and Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J.K. Rowling.

Readers learn that, once its pages were stacked, Mitchell’s manuscript towered almost 5 feet — taller than she — and that she had hidden parts of it under the carpet; Vladimir Nabokov’s ­Lolita was rejected by every publisher to which it was originally sent; and Ian Fleming, author of Casino Royale, was part of the team that cracked the Nazis’ Enigma Code.

Bond, a former high school English teacher, still remembers introducing her students to her favorite book, Emma, and how they had been moved by the story-behind-the-story Bond had pieced together about Austen’s family tragedies, which included a handicapped brother sent away to live with another family, another brother adopted and an aunt wrongly imprisoned for theft.

”The realization was for me that once they came to know Jane Austen’s back story, they began to discuss the reasons that Austen put her characters in certain situations and the reasons that characters reacted certain ways,“ Bond says. ”The students looked deeper into the book as a work of art created by a specific and special person.“