Lost Laysen is a short novel, written by Margaret Mitchell in 1916. Mitchell, who is best known as the author of Gone With the Wind, was believed to have written only one full book during her lifetime.

However, when she was 15, she had written the manuscript to Lost Laysen — a romance set in the South Pacific. She gave two notebooks containing the handwritten work to a suitor named Henry Love Angel who kept the manuscript along with a number of photographs and intimate letters with the understanding that they not be made public. After his death in 1945, his son inherited the manuscript and letters.

In 1996, Angel’s grandson discovered the amazing treasure that had been passed down to him–a box of photographs, negatives, correspondence from Mitchell to Angel, and the manuscript to her other romance novel, Lost Laysen.