It’s the birthday of Southern writer Anne Rivers Siddons (1936-2019), who wrote 19 novels, many of them bestsellers, and has been called “the Jane Austen of modern Atlanta” (critic Bob Summer).

Siddons was born in the small town of Fairburn, Georgia, to parents who were a lawyer and a secretary and had a traditional Southern belle sort of upbringing, with the usual pressure on women to be beautiful and charming. (Thank goodness I’m from South Dakota. We’re just supposed to know how to make a mean hotdish and drive sensibly in snow.) Siddons was homecoming queen in high school and joined a sorority at Auburn University in Alabama—but she also wrote for the school paper at Auburn, and in 1957 she wrote two columns supporting integration that received national attention but went over like a ton of bricks with the school administration, who fired her from the paper.

After graduation, Siddons moved to Atlanta and became a writer and editor for Atlanta magazine. Her first book was a collection of pieces first published in that magazine, John Chancellor Makes Me Cry (1975). For her first novel, Heartbreak Hotel (1976, adapted for film as Heart of Dixie in 1989), Siddons drew on her experiences at Auburn University.

Siddons’ best known novel is perhaps Peachtree Road (1988), not to be confused with the Elton John album of the same name. Stephen King compared one of Siddons’ other novels, The House Next Door (1978), to Shirley Jackson’s classic horror story The Haunting of Hill House. (Run, don’t walk, to your local library.) Siddons’ last novel, The Girls of August, came out in 2014.

Siddons died of lung cancer at 83 in Charleston, South Carolina, survived by her four stepsons.

Have a solid workhorse of a Thursday, brightened by intermittent snowfalls, and stay scrupulously honest to the data.