Gone with the Wind

By Margaret Mitchell

Pulitzer Prize winning novel, 1937.

This lengthy novel was made into a very successful movie in 1939 starring Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh as Rhett Butler and Scarlett O'Hara and Leslie Howard and Olivia De Havilland as Ashley and Melanie Wilkes. I saw the movie when I was a kid and later as an adult on TV. I had never read the novel.
The first thing I thought about the novel was that it was way too long. I had the paperback version and it's got to be at least two inches thick. I figured it would take me at least two months to read it all. In fact, I read it in 20 days.
When I first started reading it, I was a little bored with it. It seemed to get off to a slow start. I didn't really start to get interested in it until Scarlett marries Charles Hamilton, Melanie's brother. She marries Charles in a fit of pique because Ashley has asked Melanie to be his wife and Scarlett was unable to get Ashley to change his mind, even though he admits it is Scarlett he loves. Shortly there after, Charlie and Ashley are off to fight for states' rights and king cotton, leaving their respective wives home. Charlie falls ill while serving and dies and, Scarlett and Melanie move to Atlanta and are still there when Atlanta falls to the Union Army. They make a panicked escape from Atlanta with Rhett Butler's help, with poor Melanie being carried in a rickety wagon pulled by a broken down horse, all the transportation that is left in the area. Melanie is gravely ill from complications of giving birth and Rhett takes them far enough into the country headed back home to Tara to where he figures they can manage on their own. He leaves them there and goes off to fight for the Rebels even though he knows it is a lost cause.
Rhett has fancied Scarlett ever since that night when he overheard Scarlett begging Ashley to forget Melanie and be with her instead. When Ashley oh so nobly turns her down and leaves the room, Scarlett smashes a vase in anger. This unladylike behavior endears her to Rhett because he himself is an outcast and a social pariah. He feels he has a lot in common with Scarlett, that they are birds of a feather.
Scarlett goes through trials and tribulations, the same trials and tribulations suffered by the rest of the South in the final days and the aftermath of the war.
She manages to take care of herself and her family and even is able to keep the Yankees from burning Tara like they did to most of the plantation homes in the area. She eventually ends up back in Atlanta with Melanie and Ashley. She marries an older man just for his money, which she needs to save Tara from being sold for back taxes. The older man gets killed during a raid by the Ku Klux Klan, of which he was a member.
Rhett finally realizes he will never get Scarlett unless he marries her, as she has steadfastly refused all his advances. He proposes and she accepts, although he knows that Scarlett is still enamored of Ashley Wilkes. He figures that Scarlett will eventually realize that Ashley is a weak man and then she will love Rhett instead. But Scarlett never comes to that realization until it is too late. By then, Rhett and Scarlett's little daughter is dead in a riding accident and Rhett is so torn up by the loss and by Scarlett's accusation that it was all his fault that he has completely fallen out of love with Scarlett.
The novel ends with Scarlett awareness that she really did love Rhett. She finally admits that Ashley is not the man she thought and her infatuation with him was just a school girl crush. She also realizes, too late, that her hated rival, Melanie (who has died of a miscarriage) was Scarlett's best and dearest friend. Although Rhett has left her, the book ends on a note of optimism with Scarlett vowing that she will get him to love her again someday. And knowing Scarlett, I believe she would.

I enjoyed this novel a lot. Especially the part set in the Reconstruction era. I had no idea how hard Reconstruction was on the South or how much fraud and corruption there was in the government imposed on the South by the North. It was an eye opener.
A couple quibbles... Rhett is a man in his forties when he marries Scarlett; he is well-traveled, smart and sophisticated. Scarlett is only in her twenties, and although she has been through a lot, she is ignorant, uneducated, selfish and shallow. He knows this when he marries her, just as he knows she is still infatuated with Ashley Wilkes. He marries her fully expecting that she will change. This I found to be completely unbelievable. What person in their forties doesn't know that you can't change people? Maybe Mitchell at the time she wrote the book was too young to know this sad fact of life either.
Also Margaret Mitchell's attitude towards blacks is condescending. She claims, in the book, that blacks are child-like and need to be taken in hand and lead by a kind, and wise white master. At one point she has Ashley explaining that although he had slaves, they were never miserable. In the book, blacks are divided into two types, house servants and field hands. The smart ones were raised to be servants and the stupid ones to work the fields. Mitchell's attitude is that blacks were much better off under slavery than when they were freed because they were fed, clothed, taken care of and kept out of trouble when slaves. She seems to not realize that limiting a people to being either a servant or a field hand is vast waste of human potential. Think of all the possible lawyers, doctors, teachers, engineers, poets, entrepreneurs, artists who spent their lives in servitude, never being allowed to grow to their full capacity. What a shame.
Other than that, I really enjoyed the story. It's a long book, but very engaging and well worth the investment of time it takes to read. Also, you might learn a little history too. I know I did.

Review from The Guardian:    https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2016/aug/31/books-to-give-you-hope-gone-with-the-wind-by-margaret-mitchell.