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- Herausgeber: DigiCat
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
Margaret Mitchell's "Gone with the Wind" is an epic historical novel that chronicles the tumultuous life of Scarlett O'Hara, a headstrong Southern belle, against the backdrop of the American Civil War and Reconstruction. Mitchell's prose is characterized by its rich detail and lyrical quality, weaving a complex tapestry of personal and societal upheaval. The novel explores themes of love, loss, and survival, illustrating the fierce resilience of its protagonist amidst the changing fortunes of her world. Set in Georgia, the narrative captures the cultural and economic shifts of the Old South, posing profound questions about morality and identity in times of crisis. Born in 1900 in Atlanta, Georgia, Margaret Mitchell's upbringing in a region steeped in Civil War history profoundly influenced her writing. Her own family narratives, along with her keen observations of the South's complexities and contradictions, provided a unique lens through which she crafted her sprawling narrative. After a series of personal setbacks, including a lengthy illness, Mitchell dedicated herself to writing, culminating in the laborious yet transformative process that brought "Gone with the Wind" to fruition. This monumental work is highly recommended for readers seeking not only a gripping story but also an insightful exploration of human nature during transformative historical moments. Mitchell's mastery of character development and atmospheric detail make this novel a quintessential American classic, offering an enduring reflection on love and loss that resonates with contemporary readers. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - An Author Biography reveals milestones in the author's life, illuminating the personal insights behind the text. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
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Gone with the Wind
Table of Contents
Introduction
In a world torn open by war and the collapse of old certainties, private ambition and raw survival contend in a relentless duel, as a young woman discovers that endurance, not romance, is the hard currency of a society reshaped by loss, upheaval, and the stubborn pull of the land, where love, pride, and power twist together like smoke rising from fields left smoldering, and every choice carves an indelible mark upon both heart and homeland.
Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell, first published in 1936, holds a formidable place in twentieth-century American literature for its sweeping narrative scope and its unflinching portrayal of a society in convulsion. Awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1937, the novel quickly became a cultural touchstone, read by millions and discussed across generations. Its power derives not only from its dramatic setting during the American Civil War and Reconstruction but also from its intimate focus on individual will, desire, and adaptation. The book’s scale, combined with its intense character study, helped define the modern popular historical epic.
Margaret Mitchell, an Atlanta native and former journalist, wrote the novel over several years in the 1920s and 1930s. She began drafting it while recuperating from an injury, gradually revising and expanding the manuscript before its acceptance by Macmillan for publication. The book’s gestation in Atlanta is significant: Mitchell drew upon regional memory, family stories, and her city’s landscape to shape a narrative steeped in place. The resulting work emerges from the author’s close observation of Southern society and its remembered past, producing a story that feels both intimate and expansive without claiming the authority of formal historical scholarship.
At its core, the novel follows a determined young woman from a Georgia plantation as she confronts the sudden ruin of the life she expected and the harsh realities of survival. The story’s opening acts situate readers within the rituals, assumptions, and hierarchies of antebellum society, then move inexorably into the chaos and deprivation of war and its aftermath. Without disclosing later developments, it is enough to say that the protagonist’s choices are shaped by urgency, scarcity, and shifting allegiances, and that the novel’s momentum comes from watching a personality recalibrate under extreme pressure.
Mitchell’s narrative combines the intimacy of a character portrait with the vastness of social upheaval. The result is a work that marries romance, coming-of-age elements, and the brutal ledger of war into a single, propulsive arc. The pacing is assured, the scenes densely textured with domestic detail, and the landscape rendered with an almost tactile clarity. Readers find themselves drawn into a world where daily necessities and grand ambitions collide, and where prosperity, illusion, duty, and desire must constantly be renegotiated in the face of relentless change.
Among the novel’s abiding themes are resilience, identity, and the costs of tenacity. The protagonist’s willpower is both admirable and troubling, revealing the paradoxes of a character who refuses to yield yet must continually recalibrate values to survive. The book interrogates the gap between self-image and reality, showing how pride, nostalgia, and longing can cloud judgment even as they sustain courage. It invites reflection on how people construct meaning after disaster, and how individual ambition can be both a tool of survival and a force that isolates, hardens, or blinds.
Equally central to any contemporary reading is the novel’s portrayal of the South, which reflects the assumptions and racial attitudes of its author’s time. The book romanticizes aspects of the antebellum order and includes depictions of enslaved people and Black characters that many readers and scholars regard as harmful and historically misleading. Critics have examined the work’s engagement with mythmaking about the Confederate cause and Reconstruction. A responsible approach acknowledges these issues, situating the novel within both literary history and a broader conversation about how narratives shape public memory and understanding of the past.
The novel’s reception history underscores its status as a classic. It achieved extraordinary popular success upon publication and has remained widely read, translated, and debated. Its 1939 film adaptation helped cement the story’s position in global popular culture, extending its reach while also amplifying conversations about representation, nostalgia, and historical accuracy. Beyond sales and screen legacy, the book’s persistent presence in public discourse indicates the peculiar magnetism of its characters, conflicts, and moral ambiguities, which continue to provoke discussion across disciplines and generations.
As a piece of craft, the novel is notable for its command of perspective and its orchestration of a large cast. The protagonist’s fierce self-interest is counterpoised with figures who mirror, challenge, or complicate her aims, allowing the book to stage ethical debates through action and dialogue. The omniscient narrative voice shifts between sweeping panoramas and domestic close-ups, giving readers a layered sense of community under strain. Setting functions almost as a character: town squares, parlors, fields, and ruined streets collectively register the narrative’s emotional and material stakes.
Mitchell’s work influenced the trajectory of historical fiction and the popular saga, demonstrating how intimate character arcs can anchor vast social canvases. The figure of a flawed, forceful heroine navigating catastrophe helped shape expectations for later epics that blend romance, survival, and social critique. Even writers who resist its politics have responded to its narrative energy, structural ambition, and high-stakes moral drama. The novel’s legacy persists less as a template for facts than as a demonstration of how story architecture, pacing, and character obsession can command sustained reader attention.
Reading the novel today invites two complementary modes of engagement: immersion in its dramatic storytelling and critical scrutiny of its historical framing. Awareness of how the narrative refracts memory through ideology can deepen appreciation of its craft while clarifying its limitations. The book thus becomes both an engrossing tale and a text for interrogation, prompting questions about collective memory, myth, and the responsibilities of art when depicting traumatic histories. Such a dual approach keeps the reading experience rigorous, humane, and open to dialogue across viewpoints.
Ultimately, Gone with the Wind endures because it confronts upheaval, ambition, and the reshaping of identity—concerns that remain urgent in any era marked by rapid change. Its grandeur of scale and relentless focus on choice and consequence give it lasting appeal, even as its historical representations require careful contextualization. Contemporary readers may see reflections of current debates over memory, belonging, and resilience in its pages. By pairing narrative propulsion with demanding ethical questions, the novel maintains its status as a classic whose significance continues to be argued, tested, and felt.
Synopsis
Gone with the Wind (1936) by Margaret Mitchell is an expansive historical novel set in Georgia before, during, and after the American Civil War. Opening amid the prosperity of plantations in Clayton County, it presents a society built on enslaved labor, rigid hierarchies, and strict codes of honor. The story centers on Scarlett O’Hara, a headstrong planter’s daughter whose charm masks fierce will. As social rituals and expectations define her world, she navigates courtship, family obligations, and an unspoken craving for autonomy. Mitchell’s canvas is panoramic yet intimate, situating Scarlett’s personal ambitions within the fragile order of the antebellum South.
Scarlett’s fixation on Ashley Wilkes, a neighboring gentleman groomed by tradition, propels the opening conflict. At a gathering at Twelve Oaks, she learns Ashley will marry his gentle cousin, Melanie Hamilton, whose calm integrity contrasts with Scarlett’s impulsiveness. Undeterred, Scarlett declares herself to Ashley, confronting the limits of decorum and the gulf between desire and duty. In the wave of offended pride that follows, she makes a hasty marital choice that secures status but not fulfillment. The outbreak of war interrupts these entanglements, recasting flirtations as farewells and thrusting Scarlett, still barely out of girlhood, toward responsibilities she never imagined.
The war quickly reshapes everyday life. With many men enlisting, Scarlett becomes a young widow and retreats from mourning customs she finds suffocating. She moves to Atlanta, where her aunt hosts Melanie and other refugees, and encounters Rhett Butler, a worldly outsider whose sardonic realism challenges wartime romanticism. Rhett profits as a blockade runner and admires Scarlett’s candor, even as society disapproves of both. Their exchange of favors and jibes exposes competing creeds: practicality versus piety, survival versus reputation. Atlanta, initially bustling with optimism, tightens under shortages, hospital work, and casualty lists that steadily erode illusions about glory.
As Union armies press toward Atlanta, the city becomes a frontline. Scarlett, obliged to care for the ailing and vulnerable, confronts fear, exhaustion, and the logistics of survival amid bombardment. Fires and chaos mark the city’s fall, and a perilous flight from Atlanta forces her to improvise under extreme duress. The journey back to the countryside reveals ruined roads, empty fields, and the fragility of wartime alliances. The ordeal hardens Scarlett’s resolve, narrowing her focus to immediate necessities—food, safety, shelter—while loosening the hold of conventional propriety. The grand rituals of society recede before the grim arithmetic of endurance.
Back at her family plantation, Tara, Scarlett finds devastation: crops ravaged, wealth dissolved, and the social order overturned. With her father diminished and her mother absent, she becomes the linchpin for siblings, relatives, and dependents who remain. Scarcity, punitive taxes, and predatory opportunists amplify the strain. Scarlett improvises, barters, and bargains, discovering that tact and charm cannot replace grit. She also confronts the moral wreckage of a world built on bondage, even as she clings to land as the last anchor of identity. The lessons of hunger and fear imprint a new creed that prizes survival over sentiment.
In Reconstruction-era Atlanta, Scarlett channels desperation into enterprise, investing in lumber and exploiting opportunities others deem unseemly for a woman. Her business instincts, bargaining nerve, and indifference to gossip fuel rapid gains, while alienating neighbors who view profit-seeking and independence as unwomanly. She makes calculated marital decisions to protect property and capital, treating respectability as a tool rather than a compass. Around her, political upheaval, occupation, and cycles of violence unsettle daily life. The novel’s focus remains personal, tracing how Scarlett measures every choice against the memory of hunger and the imperative to secure a future on her terms.
Yet Scarlett’s private longings persist. Her attachment to Ashley endures as an idée fixe, renewed by proximity to Melanie, whose steadfast kindness complicates every rivalry. Rhett, amused and exasperated by Scarlett’s audacity, courts and challenges her in equal measure. Their encounters oscillate between mutual recognition and bruising pride, set against scenes of revived luxury that contrast starkly with ongoing hardship. Lavish gifts, daring business moves, and public scenes reveal tangled motives: affection, vanity, revenge, and fear of vulnerability. Each character clings to an ideal—honor, gentility, independence, or love—testing whether such ideals can survive altered fortunes and relentless memory.
As fortunes rise and fall, personal conflicts sharpen. Misunderstandings accumulate, and the costs of pride, secrecy, and stubbornness become unmistakable. Community rules tighten around reputation, while private griefs deepen in ways that public success cannot soothe. Scarlett’s devotion to Tara remains a constant measure, a touchstone she invokes to justify choices that estrange allies and unsettle intimacies. The narrative tracks how survival strategies forged in crisis can calcify into habits that hinder trust. By juxtaposing bustling streets with haunted fields, Mitchell underscores the persistence of loss, even for those who outwardly prevail, and the difficulty of reconciling past dreams with present realities.
Without disclosing later turns, the novel closes on questions rather than certainties: what endurance demands, what love can endure, and what the past still claims. Gone with the Wind remains notable for its sweeping narrative and its controversial romanticization of the Old South, inviting scrutiny of how histories are remembered and retold. Scarlett’s arc encapsulates a paradox—resourcefulness that secures survival while risking empathy and connection. The book’s endurance lies in its depiction of will, loss, and reinvention amid upheaval, alongside a legacy that prompts readers to weigh narrative power against historical accuracy and the ethics of nostalgia.
Historical Context
Gone with the Wind unfolds in Georgia and the American South from the late antebellum era through the Civil War and Reconstruction, roughly the 1840s to the 1870s. Its world is structured by plantation slavery, a racial caste system enforced in law and custom, and a patriarchal order that regulates inheritance, marriage, and public roles. Cotton drives regional wealth, linking Southern plantations to global markets and Northern finance and shipping. Atlanta, a rail junction founded in the 1830s, is rising into a commercial hub. This institutional and geographic setting frames the novel’s story of social status, property, and survival amid war and transformation.
The plantation economy depended on the forced labor of millions of enslaved Africans and their descendants, who cultivated cotton and other crops under coercion and violence. The domestic slave trade, intensified after 1808, relocated hundreds of thousands to the Deep South. Elite planters shaped political power and culture, while enslaved people built families, communities, and religious life under extreme constraints and resisted in everyday and organized ways. The novel echoes planter-class nostalgia and domestic intimacy while minimizing the brutality and systemic exploitation central to slavery, a contrast documented by slave narratives, legal records, and contemporaneous accounts of sale, punishment, and resistance.
Secession followed Abraham Lincoln’s 1860 election. Georgia left the Union in early 1861 and joined the Confederate States of America, founded to protect slavery and state sovereignty claims. Confederate leaders centralized war powers, but persistent state-level resistance complicated mobilization. The novel reflects planter perspectives during the rush to war, the expectation of a short conflict, and the social pressures on elite families to display loyalty, host gatherings, and contribute provisions. These scenes correspond to documented enthusiasm in 1861, followed by sobering casualty lists, logistical strains, and debates over Confederate nationalism versus local interests that deepened as the war continued.
The war imposed unprecedented demands. The Confederacy enacted conscription in 1862 and the controversial “twenty-slave” exemption that excused one white man for every twenty enslaved people on a plantation, breeding class resentment. Households endured separations, bereavement, and chronic scarcity. Communities organized for nursing and relief as disease killed more soldiers than battle. The novel’s depiction of women confronting shortages aligns with records of home-front adaptation—sewing circles, hospitals, and informal barter. It also mirrors complaints preserved in letters about absentee men, profiteering, and inequities in sacrifice between wealthy planters and poorer farmers pressed into military service.
Economic warfare defined the conflict. The Union blockade constricted Southern exports and imports, undermining cotton revenues and creating shortages of manufactured goods. Confederate currency depreciated rapidly, causing inflation and food riots in several cities during 1863. Southern households improvised substitutes for cloth, coffee, and medicines. The book’s focus on improvisation, speculation, and the precariousness of wealth parallels these well-documented stresses. Diaries and newspapers from Georgia describe escalating prices, rationing, and debates over whether to burn cotton, run blockades, or plant food crops—choices that reshaped class relations and tested allegiances within communities and families.
Atlanta’s strategic role as a rail nexus made it a key Union objective. In 1864, Union forces under William T. Sherman advanced through northwestern Georgia, fighting a series of battles in the Atlanta Campaign before besieging the city. Atlanta fell in early September 1864, followed by evacuations and large fires; additional destruction accompanied Sherman’s departure in November. The novel’s portrayal of bombardment, hospital overcrowding, and chaotic flight reflects eyewitness reports of the siege, the cutting of rail lines, and the city’s transformation from a booming wartime supply center into a gutted landscape requiring reconstruction and new economic orientations after the conflict.
Sherman’s March to the Sea, launched in November 1864, employed destructive tactics aimed at Confederate logistics and morale. Union troops dismantled rails, consumed or seized provisions, and targeted Confederate infrastructure, reaching Savannah in December. Although policy tried to curb indiscriminate violence, the campaign imposed severe hardship on civilians and enslaved people, who seized opportunities to flee to Union lines. The novel channels the shock of sudden material loss and the calculus of survival faced by plantations in the march’s path. Historical accounts document both devastation and the reordering of local power as military occupation challenged planter authority and enabled emancipation.
Emancipation unfolded unevenly. The Emancipation Proclamation (1863) freed enslaved people in areas under Union control; the Thirteenth Amendment (1865) abolished slavery nationwide. Freedpeople prioritized family reunification, land access, fair labor contracts, education, and independent churches. Missionaries and the Freedmen’s Bureau supported schools and legal aid, though resources were limited and opposition strong. The novel generally sidelines Black aspirations and agency, contrasting with records of freedpeople establishing schools, negotiating wages, and pursuing land, including on Georgia’s coast where short-lived land orders in 1865 briefly promised plots before federal policy reversed course, returning much property to former Confederates.
Reconstruction brought federal oversight and new civil rights. The Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the Fourteenth Amendment (ratified 1868) established birthright citizenship and equal protection; the Reconstruction Acts of 1867 placed former Confederate states, including Georgia, under military administration (Georgia within the Third Military District). The Freedmen’s Bureau mediated labor disputes and provided relief until 1872. The novel depicts Reconstruction officials and policies with suspicion, reflecting a viewpoint later endorsed by the Dunning School of history, which overstated corruption and minimized racial violence and Black political participation documented in legislative records and congressional investigations.
Black political engagement reshaped Georgia after 1867. Black men voted and held office in constitutional conventions and state government. In 1868, Georgia’s legislature expelled Black members—the “Original 33”—prompting federal intervention; they were reinstated by 1870, when Georgia completed readmission after ratifying the Fifteenth Amendment. Paramilitary violence by groups including the Ku Klux Klan sought to suppress Black voting, leading to federal Enforcement Acts (1870–1871). The novel reframes or sanitizes vigilante activity, while testimony collected by Congress and court records document organized terror that targeted Black communities, white Republicans, and local officials during Reconstruction.
The collapse of slavery gave way to sharecropping and tenant farming. Without capital and facing restricted credit, many freedpeople and poor whites entered crop-lien arrangements that trapped households in debt. Cotton remained dominant, but price volatility and boll weevil infestations later compounded risk. In Georgia, convict leasing began in the late 1860s, funneling prisoners—disproportionately Black—into brutal labor contracts with private firms, reflecting continuity between old and new forms of coercion. The novel’s emphasis on postwar scramble for income and land aligns with the period’s economic precarity, while its narrow lens obscures how policy and violence constrained Black economic mobility.
Gender norms before the war idealized white women’s domesticity and dependence, though women of all classes labored extensively. Wartime necessity pushed many into nursing, plantation management, and urban employment. In the 1860s, several Southern states, including Georgia, enacted reforms that expanded married women’s rights to hold separate property, often to protect family assets amid crisis. Postwar, some women ran businesses or managed farms in the absence of male kin. The novel’s portrayal of a woman leveraging property and credit echoes these legal and economic shifts, even as it clashes with prevailing expectations about propriety and the boundaries of female public action.
Atlanta’s resurgence exemplified “New South” boosterism, a late nineteenth-century push for industrial growth, railroad expansion, and urban markets. Figures such as Henry W. Grady promoted diversification beyond plantation agriculture, touting textile mills, commercial services, and reconciliation with the North. By the 1880s, Atlanta hosted expositions and cultivated a reputation as a modernizing city. The novel’s later urban business settings mirror this trajectory from ruin to commercial dynamism, with railroads, warehouses, and real estate replacing antebellum symbols of status. This shift reflects documented patterns of capital formation, civic promotion, and the city’s emergence as a regional economic center.
The culture of memory shaped how the war and Reconstruction were remembered. Organizations like the United Daughters of the Confederacy (founded 1894) promoted monuments, textbooks, and rituals that enshrined the Lost Cause: a narrative that romanticized plantation life, downplayed slavery’s centrality, and cast Reconstruction as vindictive misrule. Academic currents such as the Dunning School reinforced this view into the early twentieth century. Writing in the 1920s–1930s, Margaret Mitchell drew on family stories and a broader memory culture formed under Jim Crow. The novel reflects this milieu, privileging white Southern perspectives and nostalgia that diverge from contemporaneous Black memoirs and official records.
Jim Crow segregation defined the author’s era. After Reconstruction, Southern states, including Georgia, implemented disenfranchisement through poll taxes and literacy tests, segregated public facilities, and tolerated racial terror. The U.S. Supreme Court sanctioned “separate but equal” in 1896. A revived Ku Klux Klan emerged in 1915 at Stone Mountain, Georgia, amid a national surge in nativism. These institutions and ideologies formed the backdrop for the novel’s composition and reception, shaping characterizations, plot devices involving vigilantism, and assumptions about race and order that echo popular films, newspapers, and civic commemorations of the early twentieth century.
Gone with the Wind appeared in 1936 during the Great Depression, when audiences were drawn to narratives of endurance, resourcefulness, and loss. It was a bestseller and received the 1937 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. While readers responded to its sweeping scope and focus on survival, the book’s racial portrayals drew criticism from African American commentators and have remained contentious. Although the Depression is not its subject, the economic insecurity of the 1930s helped make its depictions of rebuilding fortunes and navigating scarcity resonant, even as its treatment of slavery and Reconstruction reflected older, contested historical interpretations.
Language and representation in the novel rely on dialect and stereotypes widely present in early twentieth-century American literature and film. These conventions obscure the documented diversity of Black experiences in the nineteenth-century South—articulated in church records, Black newspapers that arose during Reconstruction, and later oral histories collected in the 1930s. By foregrounding white planter-class memory and comic or loyalist caricatures, the book distances readers from the political and cultural creativity of freed communities, including school-building, mutual aid societies, and advocacy for civil rights that can be traced in Bureau archives and state legislative debates of the period. The novel’s everyday details—food shortages, improvised garments, and the etiquette of visits—draw on genuine nineteenth-century practices preserved in diaries, etiquette manuals, advertisements, and letters from Georgia and neighboring states. The transition from plantation seasonality to wartime scarcities, followed by new urban routines, is consistent with records of rationing, home production of cloth (homespun), and the postwar proliferation of small shops and boardinghouses. These textures help the novel evoke its era, even when its interpretive frame is partial or ideologically slanted. The book’s depiction of law, order, and violence participates in debates that defined Reconstruction. Historical sources record federal efforts to prosecute Klan activity under the 1871 Ku Klux Klan Act and the uneven protection of civil rights in local courts. Georgia politics saw struggles between “Redeemer” Democrats and biracial Republican coalitions, with elections often marred by intimidation. By reframing such conflicts as necessary self-defense or social restoration, the novel aligns with Lost Cause narratives and obscures the scope of organized terror documented by congressional hearings and Department of Justice case files. As historical fiction, the novel mirrors both its setting and the era of its creation. It captures the dislocations of total war, the fragility of wealth tied to enslaved labor, and the urbanizing “New South” that rose from Atlanta’s ashes. Yet it also perpetuates a white supremacist memory that romanticizes slavery and vilifies Reconstruction, reflecting the influence of Jim Crow institutions and memorial culture. Read against primary sources and modern scholarship, the book serves less as a factual guide than as a revealing artifact of how many white Southerners in the early twentieth century chose to remember the nineteenth.
Author Biography
Margaret Mitchell (1900–1949) was an American novelist and journalist best known for Gone with the Wind, a sweeping historical novel set in the American South during the Civil War and Reconstruction. Published in 1936, it became a cultural phenomenon and earned her the Pulitzer Prize the following year. Mitchell’s career bridged local journalism and popular fiction at a time when mass-market readership and Hollywood adaptations were reshaping American letters. Though she produced only one novel during her lifetime, the breadth of its reception, influence, and controversy secured her a singular place in twentieth-century literary history and in the broader conversation about Southern memory.
Raised in Atlanta, Mitchell was educated locally and briefly attended Smith College in the late 1910s before returning home. Early exposure to regional history, veterans’ recollections, and the city’s public libraries nurtured her interest in the Civil War era and Reconstruction. She read widely in nineteenth‑century fiction and historical romances, an eclectic habit that shaped her sense of pacing, character, and scene. As a young adult she experimented with short fiction and sketches, gaining practical skills that later informed her longer work. Her outlook developed within the currents of Southern literary culture, yet her reading habits and reporting instincts lent her writing a distinctly modern sensibility.
By the early 1920s Mitchell joined the Atlanta Journal Sunday Magazine as a reporter and feature writer, covering civic events, crime, theater, and society. The newsroom gave her deadlines, interviewing discipline, and a feel for dialogue, all of which would structure her fiction. She also published profiles and human‑interest pieces that revealed a fascination with resilience amid social change. Health problems eventually curtailed her pace, and she left full‑time journalism mid‑decade. Nevertheless, the craft lessons and eye for detail acquired in that fast‑moving setting—together with a growing trove of notes on Southern history—provided the scaffolding for the historical project that became her first novel.
Mitchell began drafting what would become Gone with the Wind while recuperating at home, assembling chapters, genealogies, and research clippings over several years. She revised extensively, drawing on local archives and published histories to anchor the narrative’s chronology and settings. Encouraged by a visiting publisher’s representative, she submitted the manuscript; Macmillan released the novel in 1936. Its scale, propulsive storytelling, and vivid characterization drew immediate attention, propelling sales nationwide. Reviewers praised its narrative drive while noting its unabashed nostalgia. The book’s swift ascent from regional curiosity to national bestseller marked a turning point in her life, bringing sudden celebrity and intense public scrutiny.
In 1937 Mitchell received the Pulitzer Prize for the novel, and film rights were soon realized in a landmark 1939 adaptation that amplified the story’s reach worldwide. Translations and book club editions extended its circulation, and readers debated its themes with unusual fervor. Over time, scholars and activists have criticized the work’s romanticization of the antebellum South and its harmful racial stereotypes, placing it within broader discussions about historical mythmaking and popular entertainment. That critical reassessment has coexisted with sustained popular interest, ensuring the novel’s presence in classrooms, libraries, and media histories while prompting ongoing conversations about representation, memory, and cultural responsibility.
Mitchell did not publish another novel in her lifetime, focusing instead on correspondence with readers, permissions, and philanthropic efforts. During the Second World War she supported wartime relief efforts and local charities. She also quietly funded scholarships that helped train African American medical professionals through Atlanta institutions, an aspect of her public service acknowledged more fully in later accounts. Although she guarded her privacy, she remained attentive to historical accuracy in inquiries about her book and encouraged serious research about the period. The demands of fame and the legal and business complexities around licensing further occupied her post‑publication years.
Mitchell died in 1949 after being struck by a car in Atlanta, ending a career that was brief in output yet vast in reach. Posthumously, a youthful novella, Lost Laysen, was published in 1996, offering a glimpse of her early narrative interests. Her residence, preserved as the Margaret Mitchell House, has become a site of literary tourism and archival research. The continuing life of her novel—through reprints, study guides, and renewed debates—underscores her complicated legacy. She remains central to discussions of Southern literature, historical romance, and the power of mass culture to shape public memory, ensuring her work’s relevance in contemporary discourse.
Gone with the Wind
PART ONE
CHAPTER I
Scarlett O’Hara was not beautiful, but men seldom realized it when caught by her charm as the Tarleton twins were[1q]. In her face were too sharply blended the delicate features of her mother, a Coast aristocrat of French descent, and the heavy ones of her florid Irish father. But it was an arresting face, pointed of chin, square of jaw. Her eyes were pale green without a touch of hazel, starred with bristly black lashes and slightly tilted at the ends. Above them, her thick black brows slanted upward, cutting a startling oblique line in her magnolia-white skin — that skin so prized by Southern women and so carefully guarded with bonnets, veils and mittens against hot Georgia suns.
Seated with Stuart and Brent Tarleton in the cool shade of the porch of Tara[1], her father’s plantation, that bright April afternoon of 1861, she made a pretty picture. Her new green flowered-muslin dress spread its twelve yards of billowing material over her hoops and exactly matched the flat-heeled green morocco slippers her father had recently brought her from Atlanta. The dress set off to perfection the seventeen-inch waist, the smallest in three counties, and the tightly fitting basque showed breasts well matured for her sixteen years. But for all the modesty of her spreading skirts, the demureness of hair netted smoothly into a chignon and the quietness of small white hands folded in her lap, her true self was poorly concealed. The green eyes in the carefully sweet face were turbulent, willful, lusty with life, distinctly at variance with her decorous demeanor. Her manners had been imposed upon her by her mother’s gentle admonitions and the sterner discipline of her mammy; her eyes were her own.
On either side of her, the twins lounged easily in their chairs, squinting at the sunlight through tall mint-garnished glasses as they laughed and talked, their long legs, booted to the knee and thick with saddle muscles, crossed negligently. Nineteen years old, six feet two inches tall, long of bone and hard of muscle, with sunburned faces and deep auburn hair, their eyes merry and arrogant, their bodies clothed in identical blue coats and mustard-colored breeches, they were as much alike as two bolls of cotton.
Outside, the late afternoon sun slanted down in the yard, throwing into gleaming brightness the dogwood trees that were solid masses of white blossoms against the background of new green. The twins’ horses were hitched in the driveway, big animals, red as their masters’ hair; and around the horses’ legs quarreled the pack of lean, nervous possum hounds that accompanied Stuart and Brent wherever they went. A little aloof, as became an aristocrat, lay a black-spotted carriage dog, muzzle on paws, patiently waiting for the boys to go home to supper.
Between the hounds and the horses and the twins there was a kinship deeper than that of their constant companionship. They were all healthy, thoughtless young animals, sleek, graceful, high-spirited, the boys as mettlesome as the horses they rode, mettlesome and dangerous but, withal, sweet-tempered to those who knew how to handle them.
Although born to the ease of plantation life, waited on hand and foot since infancy, the faces of the three on the porch were neither slack nor soft. They had the vigor and alertness of country people who have spent all their lives in the open and troubled their heads very little with dull things in books. Life in the north Georgia county of Clayton was still new and, according to the standards of Augusta, Savannah and Charleston, a little crude. The more sedate and older sections of the South looked down their noses at the up-country Georgians, but here in north Georgia, a lack of the niceties of classical education carried no shame, provided a man was smart in the things that mattered. And raising good cotton, riding well, shooting straight, dancing lightly, squiring the ladies with elegance and carrying one’s liquor like a gentleman were the things that mattered.
In these accomplishments the twins excelled, and they were equally outstanding in their notorious inability to learn anything contained between the covers of books. Their family had more money, more horses, more slaves than any one else in the County, but the boys had less grammar than most of their poor Cracker neighbors.
It was for this precise reason that Stuart and Brent were idling on the porch of Tara this April afternoon. They had just been expelled from the University of Georgia, the fourth university that had thrown them out in two years; and their older brothers, Tom and Boyd, had come home with them, because they refused to remain at an institution where the twins were not welcome. Stuart and Brent considered their latest expulsion a fine joke, and Scarlett, who had not willingly opened a book since leaving the Fayetteville Female Academy the year before, thought it just as amusing as they did.
“I know you two don’t care about being expelled, or Tom either,” she said. “But what about Boyd? He’s kind of set on getting an education, and you two have pulled him out of the University of Virginia and Alabama and South Carolina and now Georgia. He’ll never get finished at this rate.”
“Oh, he can read law in Judge Parmalee’s office over in Fayetteville,” answered Brent carelessly. “Besides, it don’t matter much. We’d have had to come home before the term was out anyway.”
“Why?”
“The war, goose! The war’s going to start any day, and you don’t suppose any of us would stay in college with a war going on, do you?”
“You know there isn’t going to be any war,” said Scarlett, bored. “It’s all just talk. Why, Ashley Wilkes and his father told Pa just last week that our commissioners in Washington would come to — to — an — amicable agreement with Mr. Lincoln about the Confederacy. And anyway, the Yankees are too scared of us to fight. There won’t be any war, and I’m tired of hearing about it.”
“Not going to be any war!” cried the twins indignantly, as though they had been defrauded.
“Why, honey, of course there’s going to be a war,” said Stuart. “The Yankees may be scared of us, but after the way General Beauregard shelled them out of Fort Sumter[2] day before yesterday, they’ll have to fight or stand branded as cowards before the whole world. Why, the Confederacy — ”
Scarlett made a mouth of bored impatience.
“If you say ‘war’ just once more, I’ll go in the house and shut the door. I’ve never gotten so tired of any one word in my life as ‘war,’ unless it’s ‘secession.’ Pa talks war morning, noon and night, and all the gentlemen who come to see him shout about Fort Sumter and States’ Rights and Abe Lincoln till I get so bored I could scream! And that’s all the boys talk about, too, that and their old Troop. There hasn’t been any fun at any party this spring because the boys can’t talk about anything else. I’m mighty glad Georgia waited till after Christmas before it seceded or it would have ruined the Christmas parties, too. If you say ‘war’ again, I’ll go in the house.”
She meant what she said, for she could never long endure any conversation of which she was not the chief subject. But she smiled when she spoke, consciously deepening her dimple and fluttering her bristly black lashes as swiftly as butterflies’ wings. The boys were enchanted, as she had intended them to be, and they hastened to apologize for boring her. They thought none the less of her for her lack of interest. Indeed, they thought more. War was men’s business, not ladies’, and they took her attitude as evidence of her femininity.
Having maneuvered them away from the boring subject of war, she went back with interest to their immediate situation.
“What did your mother say about you two being expelled again?”
The boys looked uncomfortable, recalling their mother’s conduct three months ago when they had come home, by request, from the University of Virginia.
“Well,” said Stuart, “she hasn’t had a chance to say anything yet. Tom and us left home early this morning before she got up, and Tom’s laying out over at the Fontaines’ while we came over here.”
“Didn’t she say anything when you got home last night?”
“We were in luck last night. Just before we got home that new stallion Ma got in Kentucky last month was brought in, and the place was in a stew. The big brute — he’s a grand horse, Scarlett; you must tell your pa to come over and see him right away — he’d already bitten a hunk out of his groom on the way down here and he’d trampled two of Ma’s darkies who met the train at Jonesboro. And just before we got home, he’d about kicked the stable down and half-killed Strawberry, Ma’s old stallion. When we got home, Ma was out in the stable with a sackful of sugar smoothing him down and doing it mighty well, too. The darkies were hanging from the rafters, popeyed, they were so scared, but Ma was talking to the horse like he was folks and he was eating out of her hand. There ain’t nobody like Ma with a horse. And when she saw us she said: ‘In Heaven’s name, what are you four doing home again? You’re worse than the plagues of Egypt!’ And then the horse began snorting and rearing and she said: ‘Get out of here! Can’t you see he’s nervous, the big darling? I’ll tend to you four in the morning!’ So we went to bed, and this morning we got away before she could catch us and left Boyd to handle her.”
“Do you suppose she’ll hit Boyd?” Scarlett, like the rest of the County, could never get used to the way small Mrs. Tarleton bullied her grown sons and laid her riding crop on their backs if the occasion seemed to warrant it.
Beatrice Tarleton was a busy woman, having on her hands not only a large cotton plantation, a hundred negroes and eight children, but the largest horse-breeding farm in the state as well. She was hot-tempered and easily plagued by the frequent scrapes of her four sons, and while no one was permitted to whip a horse or a slave, she felt that a lick now and then didn’t do the boys any harm.
“Of course she won’t hit Boyd. She never did beat Boyd much because he’s the oldest and besides he’s the runt of the litter,” said Stuart, proud of his six feet two. “That’s why we left him at home to explain things to her. God’lmighty, Ma ought to stop licking us! We’re nineteen and Tom’s twenty-one, and she acts like we’re six years old.”
“Will your mother ride the new horse to the Wilkes’ barbecue tomorrow?”
“She wants to, but Pa says he’s too dangerous. And, anyway, the girls won’t let her. They said they were going to have her go to one party at least like a lady, riding in the carriage.”
“I hope it doesn’t rain tomorrow,” said Scarlett. “It’s rained nearly every day for a week. There’s nothing worse than a barbecue turned into an indoor picnic.”
“Oh, it’ll be clear tomorrow and hot as June,” said Stuart. “Look at that sunset. I never saw one redder. You can always tell weather by sunsets.”
They looked out across the endless acres of Gerald O’Hara’s newly plowed cotton fields toward the red horizon. Now that the sun was setting in a welter of crimson behind the hills across the Flint River, the warmth of the April day was ebbing into a faint but balmy chill.
Spring had come early that year, with warm quick rains and sudden frothing of pink peach blossoms and dogwood dappling with white stars the dark river swamp and far-off hills. Already the plowing was nearly finished, and the bloody glory of the sunset colored the fresh-cut furrows of red Georgia clay to even redder hues. The moist hungry earth, waiting upturned for the cotton seeds, showed pinkish on the sandy tops of furrows, vermilion and scarlet and maroon where shadows lay along the sides of the trenches. The whitewashed brick plantation house seemed an island set in a wild red sea, a sea of spiraling, curving, crescent billows petrified suddenly at the moment when the pink-tipped waves were breaking into surf. For here were no long, straight furrows, such as could be seen in the yellow clay fields of the flat middle Georgia country or in the lush black earth of the coastal plantations. The rolling foothill country of north Georgia was plowed in a million curves to keep the rich earth from washing down into the river bottoms.
It was a savagely red land, blood-colored after rains, brick dust in droughts, the best cotton land in the world. It was a pleasant land of white houses, peaceful plowed fields and sluggish yellow rivers, but a land of contrasts, of brightest sun glare and densest shade. The plantation clearings and miles of cotton fields smiled up to a warm sun, placid, complacent. At their edges rose the virgin forests, dark and cool even in the hottest noons, mysterious, a little sinister, the soughing pines seeming to wait with an age-old patience, to threaten with soft sighs: “Be careful! Be careful! We had you once. We can take you back again.”
To the ears of the three on the porch came the sounds of hooves, the jingling of harness chains and the shrill careless laughter of negro voices, as the field hands and mules came in from the fields. From within the house floated the soft voice of Scarlett’s mother, Ellen O’Hara, as she called to the little black girl who carried her basket of keys. The high-pitched, childish voice answered “Yas’m,” and there were sounds of footsteps going out the back way toward the smokehouse where Ellen would ration out the food to the home-coming hands. There was the click of china and the rattle of silver as Pork, the valet-butler of Tara, laid the table for supper.
At these last sounds, the twins realized it was time they were starting home. But they were loath to face their mother and they lingered on the porch of Tara, momentarily expecting Scarlett to give them an invitation to supper.
“Look, Scarlett. About tomorrow,” said Brent. “Just because we’ve been away and didn’t know about the barbecue and the ball, that’s no reason why we shouldn’t get plenty of dances tomorrow night. You haven’t promised them all, have you?”
“Well, I have! How did I know you all would be home? I couldn’t risk being a wallflower just waiting on you two.”
“You a wallflower!” The boys laughed uproariously.
“Look, honey. You’ve got to give me the first waltz and Stu the last one and you’ve got to eat supper with us. We’ll sit on the stair landing like we did at the last ball and get Mammy Jincy[3] to come tell our fortunes again.”
“I don’t like Mammy Jincy’s fortunes. You know she said I was going to marry a gentleman with jet-black hair and a long black mustache, and I don’t like black-haired gentlemen.”
“You like ’em red-headed, don’t you, honey?” grinned Brent. “Now, come on, promise us all the waltzes and the supper.”
“If you’ll promise, we’ll tell you a secret,” said Stuart.
“What?” cried Scarlett, alert as a child at the word.
“Is it what we heard yesterday in Atlanta, Stu? If it is, you know we promised not to tell.”
“Well, Miss Pitty told us.”
“Miss Who?”
“You know, Ashley Wilkes’ cousin who lives in Atlanta, Miss Pittypat Hamilton — Charles and Melanie Hamilton’s aunt.”
“I do, and a sillier old lady I never met in all my life.”
“Well, when we were in Atlanta yesterday, waiting for the home train, her carriage went by the depot and she stopped and talked to us, and she told us there was going to be an engagement announced tomorrow night at the Wilkes ball.”
“Oh, I know about that,” said Scarlett in disappointment. “That silly nephew of hers, Charlie Hamilton, and Honey Wilkes. Everybody’s known for years that they’d get married some time, even if he did seem kind of lukewarm about it.”
“Do you think he’s silly?” questioned Brent. “Last Christmas you sure let him buzz round you plenty.”
“I couldn’t help him buzzing,” Scarlett shrugged negligently. “I think he’s an awful sissy.”
“Besides, it isn’t his engagement that’s going to be announced,” said Stuart triumphantly. “It’s Ashley’s to Charlie’s sister, Miss Melanie!”
Scarlett’s face did not change but her lips went white — like a person who has received a stunning blow without warning and who, in the first moments of shock, does not realize what has happened. So still was her face as she stared at Stuart that he, never analytic, took it for granted that she was merely surprised and very interested.
“Miss Pitty told us they hadn’t intended announcing it till next year, because Miss Melly hasn’t been very well; but with all the war talk going around, everybody in both families thought it would be better to get married real soon. So it’s to be announced tomorrow night at the supper intermission. Now, Scarlett, we’ve told you the secret, so you’ve got to promise to eat supper with us.”
“Of course I will,” Scarlett said automatically.
“And all the waltzes?”
“All.”
“You’re sweet! I’ll bet the other boys will be hopping mad.”
“Let ’em be mad,” said Brent. “We two can handle ’em. Look, Scarlett. Sit with us at the barbecue in the morning.”
“What?”
Stuart repeated his request.
“Of course.”
The twins looked at each other jubilantly but with some surprise. Although they considered themselves Scarlett’s favored suitors, they had never before gained tokens of this favor so easily. Usually she made them beg and plead, while she put them off, refusing to give a Yes or No answer, laughing if they sulked, growing cool if they became angry. And here she had practically promised them the whole of tomorrow — seats by her at the barbecue, all the waltzes (and they’d see to it that the dances were all waltzes!) and the supper intermission. This was worth getting expelled from the university.
Filled with new enthusiasm by their success, they lingered on, talking about the barbecue and the ball and Ashley Wilkes and Melanie Hamilton, interrupting each other, making jokes and laughing at them, hinting broadly for invitations to supper. Some time had passed before they realized that Scarlett was having very little to say. The atmosphere had somehow changed. Just how, the twins did not know, but the fine glow had gone out of the afternoon. Scarlett seemed to be paying little attention to what they said, although she made the correct answers. Sensing something they could not understand, baffled and annoyed by it, the twins struggled along for a while, and then rose reluctantly, looking at their watches.
The sun was low across the new-plowed fields and the tall woods across the river were looming blackly in silhouette. Chimney swallows were darting swiftly across the yard, and chickens, ducks and turkeys were waddling and strutting and straggling in from the fields.
Stuart bellowed: “Jeems!” And after an interval a tall black boy of their own age ran breathlessly around the house and out toward the tethered horses. Jeems was their body servant and, like the dogs, accompanied them everywhere. He had been their childhood playmate and had been given to the twins for their own on their tenth birthday. At the sight of him, the Tarleton hounds rose up out of the red dust and stood waiting expectantly for their masters. The boys bowed, shook hands and told Scarlett they’d be over at the Wilkeses’ early in the morning, waiting for her. Then they were off down the walk at a rush, mounted their horses and, followed by Jeems, went down the avenue of cedars at a gallop, waving their hats and yelling back to her.
When they had rounded the curve of the dusty road that hid them from Tara, Brent drew his horse to a stop under a clump of dogwood. Stuart halted, too, and the darky boy pulled up a few paces behind them. The horses, feeling slack reins, stretched down their necks to crop the tender spring grass, and the patient hounds lay down again in the soft red dust and looked up longingly at the chimney swallows circling in the gathering dusk. Brent’s wide ingenuous face was puzzled and mildly indignant.
“Look,” he said. “Don’t it look to you like she would of asked us to stay for supper?”
“I thought she would,” said Stuart. “I kept waiting for her to do it, but she didn’t. What do you make of it?”
“I don’t make anything of it. But it just looks to me like she might of. After all, it’s our first day home and she hasn’t seen us in quite a spell. And we had lots more things to tell her.”
“It looked to me like she was mighty glad to see us when we came.”
“I thought so, too.”
“And then, about a half-hour ago, she got kind of quiet, like she had a headache.”
“I noticed that but I didn’t pay it any mind then. What do you suppose ailed her?”
“I dunno. Do you suppose we said something that made her mad?”
They both thought for a minute.
“I can’t think of anything. Besides, when Scarlett gets mad, everybody knows it. She don’t hold herself in like some girls do.”
“Yes, that’s what I like about her. She don’t go around being cold and hateful when she’s mad — she tells you about it. But it was something we did or said that made her shut up talking and look sort of sick. I could swear she was glad to see us when we came and was aiming to ask us to supper.”
“You don’t suppose it’s because we got expelled?”
“Hell, no! Don’t be a fool. She laughed like everything when we told her about it. And besides Scarlett don’t set any more store by book learning than we do.”
Brent turned in the saddle and called to the negro groom.
“Jeems!”
“Suh?”
“You heard what we were talking to Miss Scarlett about?”
“Nawsuh, Mist’ Brent! Huccome you think Ah be spyin’ on w’ite folks?”
“Spying, my God! You darkies know everything that goes on. Why, you liar, I saw you with my own eyes sidle round the corner of the porch and squat in the cape jessamine bush by the wall. Now, did you hear us say anything that might have made Miss Scarlett mad — or hurt her feelings?”
Thus appealed to, Jeems gave up further pretense of not having overheard the conversation and furrowed his black brow.
“Nawsuh, Ah din’ notice y’all say anything ter mek her mad. Look ter me lak she sho glad ter see you an’ sho had missed you, an’ she cheep along happy as a bird, tell ’bout de time y’all got ter talkin’ ’bout Mist’ Ashley an’ Miss Melly Hamilton gittin’ mah’ied. Den she quiet down lak a bird w’en de hawk fly ober.”
The twins looked at each other and nodded, but without comprehension.
“Jeems is right. But I don’t see why,” said Stuart. “My Lord! Ashley don’t mean anything to her, ’cept a friend. She’s not crazy about him. It’s us she’s crazy about.”
Brent nodded an agreement.
“But do you suppose,” he said, “that maybe Ashley hadn’t told her he was going to announce it tomorrow night and she was mad at him for not telling her, an old friend, before he told everybody else? Girls set a big store on knowing such things first.”
“Well, maybe. But what if he hadn’t told her it was tomorrow? It was supposed to be a secret and a surprise, and a man’s got a right to keep his own engagement quiet, hasn’t he? We wouldn’t have known it if Miss Melly’s aunt hadn’t let it out. But Scarlett must have known he was going to marry Miss Melly sometime. Why, we’ve known it for years. The Wilkes and Hamiltons always marry their own cousins. Everybody knew he’d probably marry her some day, just like Honey Wilkes is going to marry Miss Melly’s brother, Charles.”
“Well, I give it up. But I’m sorry she didn’t ask us to supper. I swear I don’t want to go home and listen to Ma take on about us being expelled. It isn’t as if this was the first time.”
“Maybe Boyd will have smoothed her down by now. You know what a slick talker that little varmint is. You know he always can smooth her down.”
“Yes, he can do it, but it takes Boyd time. He has to talk around in circles till Ma gets so confused that she gives up and tells him to save his voice for his law practice. But he ain’t had time to get good started yet. Why, I’ll bet you Ma is still so excited about the new horse that she’ll never even realize we’re home again till she sits down to supper tonight and sees Boyd. And before supper is over she’ll be going strong and breathing fire. And it’ll be ten o’clock before Boyd gets a chance to tell her that it wouldn’t have been honorable for any of us to stay in college after the way the Chancellor talked to you and me. And it’ll be midnight before he gets her turned around to where she’s so mad at the Chancellor she’ll be asking Boyd why he didn’t shoot him. No, we can’t go home till after midnight.”
The twins looked at each other glumly. They were completely fearless of wild horses, shooting affrays and the indignation of their neighbors, but they had a wholesome fear of their red-haired mother’s outspoken remarks and the riding crop that she did not scruple to lay across their breeches.
“Well, look,” said Brent. “Let’s go over to the Wilkes’. Ashley and the girls’ll be glad to have us for supper.”
Stuart looked a little discomforted.
“No, don’t let’s go there. They’ll be in a stew getting ready for the barbecue tomorrow and besides — ”
“Oh, I forgot about that,” said Brent hastily. “No, don’t let’s go there.”
They clucked to their horses and rode along in silence for a while, a flush of embarrassment on Stuart’s brown cheeks. Until the previous summer, Stuart had courted India Wilkes with the approbation of both families and the entire County. The County felt that perhaps the cool and contained India Wilkes would have a quieting effect on him. They fervently hoped so, at any rate. And Stuart might have made the match, but Brent had not been satisfied. Brent liked India but he thought her mighty plain and tame, and he simply could not fall in love with her himself to keep Stuart company. That was the first time the twins’ interests had ever diverged, and Brent was resentful of his brother’s attentions to a girl who seemed to him not at all remarkable.
Then, last summer at a political speaking in a grove of oak trees at Jonesboro, they both suddenly became aware of Scarlett O’Hara. They had known her for years, and, since their childhood, she had been a favorite playmate, for she could ride horses and climb trees almost as well as they. But now to their amazement she had become a grown-up young lady and quite the most charming one in all the world.
They noticed for the first time how her green eyes danced, how deep her dimples were when she laughed, how tiny her hands and feet and what a small waist she had. Their clever remarks sent her into merry peals of laughter and, inspired by the thought that she considered them a remarkable pair, they fairly outdid themselves.
It was a memorable day in the life of the twins. Thereafter, when they talked it over, they always wondered just why they had failed to notice Scarlett’s charms before. They never arrived at the correct answer, which was that Scarlett on that day had decided to make them notice. She was constitutionally unable to endure any man being in love with any woman not herself, and the sight of India Wilkes and Stuart at the speaking had been too much for her predatory nature. Not content with Stuart alone, she had set her cap for Brent as well, and with a thoroughness that overwhelmed the two of them.
Now they were both in love with her, and India Wilkes and Letty Munroe, from Lovejoy, whom Brent had been half-heartedly courting, were far in the back of their minds. Just what the loser would do, should Scarlett accept either one of them, the twins did not ask. They would cross that bridge when they came to it. For the present they were quite satisfied to be in accord again about one girl, for they had no jealousies between them. It was a situation which interested the neighbors and annoyed their mother, who had no liking for Scarlett.
“It will serve you right if that sly piece does accept one of you,” she said. “Or maybe she’ll accept both of you, and then you’ll have to move to Utah, if the Mormons’ll have you — which I doubt.... All that bothers me is that some one of these days you’re both going to get lickered up and jealous of each other about that two-faced, little, green-eyed baggage, and you’ll shoot each other. But that might not be a bad idea either.”
Since the day of the speaking, Stuart had been uncomfortable in India’s presence. Not that India ever reproached him or even indicated by look or gesture that she was aware of his abruptly changed allegiance. She was too much of a lady. But Stuart felt guilty and ill at ease with her. He knew he had made India love him and he knew that she still loved him and, deep in his heart, he had the feeling that he had not played the gentleman. He still liked her tremendously and respected her for her cool good breeding, her book learning and all the sterling qualities she possessed. But, damn it, she was just so pallid and uninteresting and always the same, beside Scarlett’s bright and changeable charm. You always knew where you stood with India and you never had the slightest notion with Scarlett. That was enough to drive a man to distraction, but it had its charm.
“Well, let’s go over to Cade Calvert’s and have supper. Scarlett said Cathleen was home from Charleston. Maybe she’ll have some news about Fort Sumter that we haven’t heard.”
“Not Cathleen. I’ll lay you two to one she didn’t even know the fort was out there in the harbor, much less that it was full of Yankees until we shelled them out. All she’ll know about is the balls she went to and the beaux she collected.”
“Well, it’s fun to hear her gabble. And it’ll be somewhere to hide out till Ma has gone to bed.”
“Well, hell! I like Cathleen and she is fun and I’d like to hear about Caro Rhett and the rest of the Charleston folks; but I’m damned if I can stand sitting through another meal with that Yankee stepmother of hers.”
