Best-selling novelist wrote of women’s struggles with changing face of the South

Anne Rivers Siddons, who has died aged 83, was a best-selling novelist whose works often portrayed the lives of women coming to terms with the social mores of the American South. Siddons did not publish her first novel, the autobiographical Heartbreak Hotel, until she was 40. She went on to write 19 novels, developing a loyal readership and a reputation for creating spirited characters who defied social expectations to find their way in the world.

Her breakthrough novel was Peachtree

Road, a 1988 bestseller that chronicled the changing fortunes of an Atlanta family – and the city itself – from the 1940s to the 1980s.

Inevitably,

Siddons drew comparisons with an earlier

Atlanta novelist,

Margaret

Mitchell, author of Gone With the Wind.

Though she did not write about the Civil War, she addressed the civil rights movement, racial misunderstanding, the modernisation of the South and, for better or worse, the loss of the region’s traditions.

‘‘There’s no way not to love the South,’’ she said in 1992. ‘‘It’s such a rich place. I’m the seventh generation of my family to be born in the same little town. So it’s who I am. But you’d have to be a fool not to see what’s hurtful about it.’’

Some of her novels were set in other places – Hill Towns in Italy, Colony and Up Island in New England – but the central characters were almost always Southern women caught between the present and the past.

In Heartbreak Hotel (1976), Siddons drew on her experiences as a student in the 1950s, when she wrote an editorial calling for an end to segregation at her college, Auburn University in Alabama. It appeared with a disclaimer from university officials that they did not approve of such a move. When Siddons wrote another column calling for integration, she was dismissed from her job as editor of the student newspaper.

‘‘I was really aware of the disapproval on campus,’’ she said in 2000, ‘‘and I got the first taste of how it might feel to espouse a cause that was not everybody else’s.’’

The central female character of Heartbreak

Hotel goes through a similar experience, then goes off with a reporter covering the civil rights movement, spurning the fraternity boy she was expected to marry. The book was made into a 1989 movie, Heart of Dixie, starring Ally Sheedy.

In another autobiographical novel,

Downtown (1994), Siddons drew on her experience as a magazine journalist in Atlanta who gets caught up in social change during the 1960s, when ‘‘promises . . . hung in the bronze air like fruit on the eve of ripeness’’.

Many of her novels focused on women who

grow older with varying degrees of gracefulness, as they balance independence, love and friendship in their lives. In Fault Lines (1995), an Atlanta homemaker flees her emotionally barren husband for a new life, and a new lover, in California.

Siddons’ lush prose was sometimes criticised for veering over the top.

Fault Lines contained this description of an outdoor tryst with a bearded man in a lumberjack shirt: ‘‘Last night’s dizzy plummet into heat and red darkness took me again, and I lost myself again.’’

She lamented, ‘‘I will never be considered anything but a regional writer by the New York Times’’, but her legions of readers did not care. Her books sold by the millions, and in the early

1990s, she signed two contracts that paid her more than US$16 million for seven novels.

She spent summers in Maine for more than

40 years and moved to Charleston in 1998, but in many ways her imagination remained rooted in her native Georgia.

One of her best-received novels, Nora,

Nora (2000), was the story of a small-town girl who flourishes under the tutelage of a sophisticated, iconoclastic female teacher – the Nora of the book’s title – who arrives in

‘‘the town and the school like a comet, trailing delight and outrage in equal parts in her wake’’. ‘‘This lively, sparkling coming-of-age novel is superbly written and wholly engaging,’’ novelist Greg Johnson wrote in the Atlanta Journal Constitution. ‘‘It is also a wise and humane book that seems destined to broaden this charismatic author’s large and loyal readership.’’

Sybil Anne Rivers was born in Atlanta and grew up nearby. Groomed to be a Southern belle, she was a cheerleader and homecoming queen in high school. But instead of getting married after graduating from college in 1958, she moved to Atlanta to work in advertising. In 1963, she became an editor and writer for

Atlanta magazine, as the city was emerging as the centre of the New South. Her first book, published in 1975, was a collection of essays and articles. She then gave up journalism to concentrate on writing fiction.

Her husband of 48 years, businessman Heyward Siddons, died in 2014. Survivors include four stepsons and three grandchildren.

‘‘The South is hard on women, partly because of the emphasis put on looks and charm,’’ she told People magazine in 1991. ‘‘No matter what I did, I always ended up with this hollow feeling. It finally hit me that that’s why I write: I am writing about the journey we all take to find out what lives in that hole.’’ –

‘‘There’s no way not to love the South. But you’d have to be a fool not to see what’s hurtful about it.’’