All over the world bosoms will be heaving with sighs of relief. The book for which aficionados of romance novels have been waiting in their thousands for two years is finally out. Those sighs might even become barely concealed shudders of anticipation when they learn Margaret Mitchell's recently discovered second novel, Lost Laysen, is perfectly readable although it certainly isn't another Gone With The Wind. Mitchell was a boyish, jodphured Southern belle with the flamboyant personality to attract a string of beaux throughout her early life. Indeed, five of them once proposed to her at the same time. And she was only 15 when she sat down to belt out this complex little book in just under a month, 10 years before she would begin work on the world's No 1 best-seller. Though Lost Laysen is just 13,000 words long, jotted down in longhand in two schoolbooks with reportedly few corrections, there wasn't much time to spare to write it, considering she was being chaperoned to house parties, was on her way to Massachusetts' prestigious Smith College far from her home in Atlanta and was preoccupied with the Great War which had just begun across the Atlantic. Soon, too, she would be throwing herself with her usual excess of enthusiasm into Red Cross work but, in the meantime, young Margaret was distracted by having met the man who would be her first husband - though she chucked him out of the house after a year and swiftly divorced him. That marital hiccup aside, her life seems to have been perfectly above-board, which makes the mystery surrounding this early work particularly juicy stuff. In fact, it threatens to overwhelm the story itself which the publishers have fronted with the tale of its remarkable discovery and 'astonishing' photographs of Mitchell and the man to whom she secretly gave Lost Laysen. That said, it's difficult not to find Mitchell's long public romance with the superbly-named Henry Love Angel fascinating, or to avoid looking to their own love story for clues to the origin of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Gone With The Wind. The surprisingly rich, crisply-written Lost Laysen offers even more links. Both books contain tempestuous love triangles, unrequited love, characters giving their all for honour. In both, lives are altered forever by some terrible cataclysm. Both are simply rollicking good yarns, with dramatic moralising endings. Lost Laysen, published on the 60th anniversary of Gone With The Wind, is set in the South Pacific where narrator Billy Duncan settles back in his chair one black tropical night, lights his pipe and tells a young boy of the only woman he ever loved. First mate on an old trading tub, the Caliban, Duncan is a roughneck Irishman with a temper, much like Gone With The Wind's Gerald O'Hara. Like O'Hara, he has been forced to flee his homeland. Duncan is adventurous and more than willing to fight for a woman's honour. He manages to get into three scraps, short though the book is. For years he has lived for travelling and fighting, but then the Caliban takes on a female passenger. Courtenay Ross, named after Mitchell's best friend but more like Mitchell herself, is a strong-willed woman cast in the unlikely role of missionary. Duncan takes one look and knows he'll never forget her. He's not New Man and he's not Clark Gable; his is an underdog-like devotion. 'I just wanted to see her, to hear her, to be near her,' he explains to the boy. When the boat also takes on a dodgy half-breed, Juan Mardo, and Courtenay's lover Donald Steele, plus the odd knife and gun, there's trouble brewing on the high seas. So far so stereotyped, but it gets much more interesting when you realise Duncan's relationship with Courtenay mirrors Angel's own with Mitchell, a man in love with a woman who returns his affection but in the end fails to choose him. Duncan would wait in vain for years for Mitchell to say yes. When Courtenay decamps to a remote island, Steele, spurned but hopeful, stays with her. There's an embryonic Scarlett O'Hara - another independent woman not afraid to break life's taboos - in Mitchell's heroine. It's as well petite firebrand Courtenay is made of sterling stuff, considering she has to brave first sexual advances and then a rape attempt by the dastardly Mardo. Which is just when a volcano erupts . . . Lost Laysen has more melodrama than your average Russian disaster movie, but Mitchell's particular gift for getting away with it, for making it believable, is easier to understand when you realise how convoluted her own love life became. The woman had a lot of real-life dysfunctional experience to draw on. 'I don't seem able to love beyond a certain stage,' she once said. What lay between her and the dashing Angel is still unclear despite the selection of their letters that form part of the book's extensive introduction. Did Mitchell forget her gift of Lost Laysen to him? And what passion made her give away the book? Although he would always keep the novella, 15 letters and some 50 photographs, the devoted Angel took the secrets of their relationship to an early grave. He drank heavily and died, aged 44, in 1945. LOST LAYSEN Margaret Mitchell Orion $135