LONDON Gone With The Wind, both the film and the book, has long been a key staging post in female adolescence. For generations its lush melodrama, dodgy sexual politics and great frock opportunities have sung out to any young girl yearning for something she couldn't quite place. It was, if you like, a fairytale for almost-adults, with Scarlett O'Hara as the wayward princess and Rhett Butler as the deliciously indifferent hero.

Molly Haskell was one of those girls who grew up thrilling to GWTW's every silly, rotten riff. What makes her particular response worth reading, however, is that she went on to become a pioneering feminist film critic, principally for New York Magazine. Haskell is a southerner, with a great-great-grandfather who led a cavalry regiment during the civil war, so she also knows exactly the provincial yet patrician culture from which Margaret Mitchell and her book sprang.

It is the movie, rather than the book, which is the true subject of this quirky, clever study. What intrigues Haskell is how a project so bungled - two directors, a string of scriptwriters, multiple nervous breakdowns - could have come together at the 11th hour. At the heart of her exploration are three inter-twined life stories that of Margaret Mitchell, the genteel, one-book wonder from Atlanta, David O Selznick, the pushy immigrant producer who passed in Hollywood as an intellectual, and Vivien Leigh, at this point not mad and never lovelier.

Mitchell's story will be the least known to British readers. Born into Atlanta high society in 1900, she spent her life trying to work out what it meant to be a southern belle, and whether she wanted to be one anyway. Unusually, she went out to work - as a journalist on the Atlanta Journal - but only because she had made the biggest belle mistake of all by marrying badly. Her husband, called “Red” (make of that what you will), was a shiftless loser. After 10 months she divorced him and married someone sensible called John.

The couple cultivated his'n'hers illnesses with a kind of foetid passion, and it was while she was hobbled by a rheumatic ankle that Gone With the Wind poured out of her, written on little scraps of paper and secreted around the house. Neither art nor craft - there are far too many loose ends and longueurs - the novel nonetheless had a kind of de-historicised hyper-realism which made it perfect for America on the eve of the Second World War. The fact that three of the leading actors in the film - Leigh, Leslie Howard and Olivia de Havilland - were British only underscored the sense that current conflicts, rather than old battles, were the real subjects under scrutiny.

This double perspective of the 1860s and the 1930s allows Haskell to explore the way in which GWTW deals, and doesn't deal, with tricky topics. She is particularly good on the issue of slavery, which is virtually written out of the book and the film, so that you'd be forgiven for forgetting that the whole drama of saving Tara was actually about maintaining an economic and social status quo of a particularly wicked kind.

However, with the casting of the film in 1939, this inconvenient truth bobbed to the surface once again. Hattie McDaniel, the African-American actress who played Mammy, was herself the daughter of former slaves and had cobbled together a career in vaudeville doing minstrel routines. At the premier of the film in Atlanta she was asked to stay away. At the Oscars, where she won Best Supporting Actress, she was seated apart from the other actors. Yet when, in her subsequent career, progressive critics took issue with her for continually taking roles as a loveable, generic “mammy”, she snapped back that she'd rather play a maid for $700 a week than be one for $7.Haskell clearly admires McDaniel's pragmatic approach to the business of living in a world which is not shaped to your convenience, and she pokes wry fun at various of her northern friends who shudder theatrically at the mention of GWTW, as if admitting to having seen the film past the age of 14 is like confessing to a sneaking sympathy with the Ku Klux Klan.

She is similarly subtle when it comes to the vexed episode in which Rhett forces himself sexually on Scarlett, with the camera cutting to Leigh purring in post-coital delight. A fantasy in which Clark Gable won't take no for an answer is not, says Haskell crisply, the same thing as rape, and anyone who can't tell (and enjoy) the difference is a bit daft.

Frankly, My Dear could probably be characterised as a work of popular, post-feminist criticism. That makes it sound empty-headed and ignorant of its own historical context. In fact, the exact opposite is true. Haskell's great triumph in this wise and witty book is to look beyond Gone With The Wind's tatty glamour and restore it to a particular moment in the mid-20th century when educated women were restless, civilisation was under threat, and the wounding fact of America's racial apartheid could not hold for very much longer.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service