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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
Set against the tumultuous backdrop of the American Civil War and Reconstruction, Margaret Mitchell's "Gone with the Wind" intricately weaves a tale of love, loss, and survival through the eyes of its indomitable protagonist, Scarlett O'Hara. This sweeping historical novel employs a vivid, romantic literary style that captures the emotional intensity of its characters while exploring themes of resilience, social change, and the fragility of human relationships. Mitchell's masterful storytelling is enriched by rich imagery and detailed descriptions, allowing readers to immerse themselves in the contrasting worlds of the genteel South and the ensuing chaos of war. Margaret Mitchell, a native of Georgia, drew inspiration from her own experiences and her family's history in the South, which deeply informed her portrayal of Southern life and culture. Her acute observations of societal upheaval and the struggles of women in a patriarchal society reveal her nuanced understanding of the era. After the publication of "Gone with the Wind" in 1936, it garnered widespread acclaim, ultimately winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1937, which solidified Mitchell's legacy as a significant literary figure. For readers seeking a powerful exploration of human tenacity amidst tumultuous times, "Gone with the Wind" is an essential read. Mitchell's ability to depict complex characters against a richly detailed historical landscape invites reflection on love, loss, and identity, making it a timeless classic that resonates with contemporary audiences. 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: 2023
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Gone with the Wind
Table of Contents
Introduction
In a South convulsed by war and its aftermath, a fiercely resourceful young woman grasps at the red earth of home even as she bargains with a future she cannot control, embodying the collision between unyielding survival and nostalgic illusion, where love, land, and identity are tested against the grinding forces of history and the seductive pull of a world already slipping beyond reach as battle lines harden, fortunes tilt, and social codes fray, demanding choices that blur the boundary between virtue and ruthlessness.
Gone with the Wind endures as a classic because it is both a sweeping narrative and a cultural touchstone, a book that helped define the twentieth-century American historical epic. Published in 1936, it captured readers with its momentum, layered characters, and grand sense of place. Its immediate success and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1937 marked not only its popularity but also its recognition within the literary establishment. The story’s propulsion, emotional stakes, and sheer narrative breadth influenced how later writers imagined ambitious, genre-blending fiction, where intimate lives and national catastrophes intermingle on an operatic scale.
Written by Margaret Mitchell, a former journalist from Atlanta, the novel was drafted over several years beginning in the mid-1920s and appeared in print in 1936. Set primarily in Georgia during the American Civil War and Reconstruction, it follows the upheaval of a once-codified society and the personal reinventions it compels. Mitchell drew upon regional history and family recollections to construct a panoramic narrative attentive to place, habit, and social ritual. The result is a sprawling work that moves from plantation parlors to ravaged streets, from dances and harvests to the brutal reckonings of war and its unstable peace.
At its center stands Scarlett O’Hara, the daughter of a plantation owner whose world is shattered by conflict and scarcity. The premise is straightforward yet inexhaustible: a privileged young woman confronts a vanishing order, forced to navigate hunger, danger, and shifting power as she seeks continuity and control. Around her, figures from bustling towns, battle-scarred fields, and crumbling estates orbit, each representing a path through chaos. The narrative traces how pride, pragmatism, charm, and will can become both assets and liabilities when survival itself becomes a daily negotiation with circumstance.
Mitchell crafts this saga with an expansive, highly readable style that marries intimate psychological observation to brisk, incident-rich plotting. Scenes of domestic life unfold beside the clangor of war and the uncertainties of reconstruction, producing a tapestry where private ambition and public crisis continually inform one another. The prose relishes detail—customs, clothes, food, weather, and the choreography of social life—while maintaining a relentless forward motion. This dual focus gives the book its distinctive texture: an immersion in the routines that define identity and belonging, and a relentless reminder that such routines can collapse in a season.
The novel’s classic status also arises from its creation of an archetypal protagonist—resourceful, flawed, and insistently alive—who complicates easy moral reading. That complexity energizes discussions of character across generations and paved the way for later fiction centered on strong, morally ambiguous women navigating crisis. Writers of historical romance, family saga, and war literature have drawn on its blend of personal drama and national conflict, its capacious sense of time, and its dramatic set pieces. The book helped popularize a narrative architecture in which an entire society becomes a stage for one character’s relentless drive.
As historical fiction, the book immerses readers in the rhythms and ruptures of the nineteenth-century American South. Mitchell’s reliance on regional histories and remembered stories lends granular texture—town layouts, seasonal labor, etiquette, and the changing tenor of public life. Yet the novel’s perspective is embedded in the milieu it depicts, emphasizing certain experiences while sidelining others. That embeddedness is artistically potent and ethically fraught, prompting readers to parse how memory, myth, and nostalgia shape the telling of history. The work thus doubles as a document about storytelling itself—what gets preserved, what gets embellished, and what gets excused.
Its reception and legacy are intertwined with controversy. Celebrated for narrative power and scope, the novel has also been widely criticized for romanticizing the antebellum South, perpetuating Lost Cause mythology, and presenting racist stereotypes that obscure the realities of slavery and Black life. Contemporary engagement often involves reading with historical context and critical awareness—recognizing the book’s artistry while interrogating its omissions and distortions. This tension has kept the novel central to debates about canon formation, representation, and the responsibilities of historical fiction in documenting, and sometimes distorting, collective memory.
The story’s cultural footprint expanded with an award-winning 1939 film adaptation that carried its characters, settings, and images to an even broader audience. The adaptation cemented the narrative’s iconography—the dresses, landscapes, fires, and faces—while also intensifying conversations about race, memory, and myth. The book and film together exemplify how popular art can shape national self-understanding: they are artifacts of their time that continue to catalyze public discussion. Their longevity reflects both aesthetic appeal and contested meaning, ensuring that the novel remains a reference point across media, scholarship, and public culture.
Themes of survival, reinvention, and the costs of ambition course through the book’s pages. It examines how attachment to place can harden into myth, how love interlaces with power and property, and how social hierarchies recalibrate under pressure. The novel probes the fragility of comfort and the ingenuity demanded by scarcity, tracing the fine line between resilience and ruthlessness. It also explores gender roles and the performance of propriety, showing how personalities flex—or refuse to—in order to secure a foothold in a changed world. These concerns give the narrative psychological bite beyond its historical spectacle.
For contemporary readers, the novel’s relevance lies in its layered portrait of change: personal, social, economic, and cultural. It invites reflection on how communities remember themselves, the stories they elevate, and the realities they efface. Reading it today can illuminate ongoing debates about historical narration, regional identity, race, and the ethics of nostalgia. At the same time, its propulsive storytelling, vividly drawn scenes, and complex central figure offer enduring literary pleasures. Approached critically, the book becomes both a gripping tale of endurance and a case study in how art can romanticize the past while revealing its fractures.
Gone with the Wind stands as an expansive, absorbing narrative that entwines human tenacity with the churn of history, offering a charged meditation on desire, loss, loyalty, and self-preservation. Its classic stature rests on craft, scope, and the unforgettable vitality of its protagonist, even as its worldview demands scrutiny. That combination—narrative magnetism coupled with ethical challenge—helps explain its lasting hold on readers. Engaged with open eyes, it remains a powerful reading experience: a monument of American popular fiction whose themes of transformation and memory continue to speak, provoke, and unsettle across generations.
Synopsis
Set in Georgia on the eve of the American Civil War, the novel opens at Tara, the O'Hara family plantation, introducing Scarlett O'Hara, a determined and socially adept young woman accustomed to privilege. The local gentry gather at neighboring estates like Twelve Oaks, revealing a society built on cotton, hierarchy, and the labor of enslaved people. Scarlett observes the genteel manners, courtship rituals, and expectations placed on young ladies, while privately resisting limits on her will. Key figures enter early, including Ashley Wilkes, admired by many, and his cousin Melanie Hamilton, gentle and steadfast, whose connection to Ashley sets the stage for tensions that thread through the story.
News of secession and war transforms parties into rallies, sending young men to enlist with optimism that the conflict will be brief. Scarlett, confronting personal disappointment over Ashley’s choices, relocates within her social circle while maintaining outward composure. Amid the patriotic fervor appears Rhett Butler, a worldly outsider whose blunt views clash with local sentiment yet draw attention. Blockades tighten, luxuries vanish, and Atlanta grows into a military hub. Letters and hospital reports replace ballroom chatter. The narrative tracks how public events intersect with private concerns, positioning Scarlett between fading rituals and emerging demands that require resourcefulness rather than adherence to custom.
Scarlett goes to Atlanta to live with Aunt Pittypat and Melanie, where she becomes increasingly involved in war work, including hospital duties that test her patience and endurance. The city’s depots, makeshift wards, and parades reveal the scale of mobilization and the attrition of supplies and morale. Rhett reappears as a blockade runner with access to scarce goods and candid assessments, offering practical help while complicating Scarlett’s calculations. Brief visits from soldiers on leave bring news from the front and rekindle tensions among acquaintances. The war’s length and cost become undeniable, and Atlanta’s protective veneer thins as casualties mount and fear grows.
As Union forces approach, Atlanta endures bombardment and shortages that reduce routines to urgent necessities. During the city’s evacuation and fires, Scarlett undertakes a hazardous flight from the ruins, responsible for Melanie, a newborn, and a small group relying on her decisions. The road south is marked by patrols, abandoned homesteads, and the uncertainty of shifting lines. Physical exhaustion, improvised shelter, and constant risk turn social niceties into luxuries. The journey culminates at the gates of Tara, which stands but is altered by neglect and loss, signaling a new phase in which survival rests on labor, improvisation, and leadership.
Back at Tara, Scarlett confronts devastated fields, depleted stores, and family burdens that leave little room for ceremony. With enslaved labor disrupted and freedom newly declared, the work of planting, harvesting, and protecting the homestead demands direct oversight and hard choices. Hunger and taxation frame each decision. Scarlett assumes command over household and land, reorganizing tasks, bargaining for supplies, and pushing against customs that once defined her world. She resolves to secure food and stability, valuing results over approval. This determination, rooted in attachment to home and future security, becomes the driving force behind her actions throughout the remaining course of the story.
With the war concluded, Reconstruction policies reshape governance, property rights, and social relations across Georgia. Seeking financial security beyond the uncertain yields of farming, Scarlett turns to city commerce, investing in and managing a lumber operation that benefits from rebuilding needs. She forges alliances that provide capital, protection, and access, sometimes through conventional arrangements and sometimes by disregarding expectations for widows and ladies. Her dealings draw criticism from traditionalists and notice from officials and newcomers. Rhett’s intermittent support and sardonic advice intersect with her ambitions, while her long-standing feelings for Ashley persist, creating overlapping loyalties that influence choices in business and at home.
The wider community grapples with political upheaval, elections, and the presence of occupying forces, while secretive resistance and reprisals add danger to daily life. Legal entanglements, confrontations on roads and in forests, and disputes over labor contracts affect friends and family. Within this climate, Scarlett’s bold approach places her at the center of arguments over propriety and safety. Her household evolves, including the responsibilities of motherhood, the management of staff, and the balancing of competing claims on her time. Misunderstandings deepen among close associates, and social gatherings become sites of rumor and strain rather than celebration, reflecting the era’s unsettled equilibrium.
Prosperity brings a new house in Atlanta, elaborate furnishings, and public displays that confirm Scarlett’s success while provoking comment. Business expands into multiple ventures, and travel offers brief respite from local pressures. Yet public incidents and private missteps accumulate, including accidents, illnesses, and scenes that shift reputations. Scarlett’s rapport with Rhett alternates between collaboration and conflict, marked by wit, pride, and competing priorities. Her connection to Ashley endures as a source of confusion and respect, while Melanie’s steady kindness anchors a circle of relatives and friends. Festivities and charity events punctuate the narrative, often giving way to repercussions that alter household dynamics.
The closing chapters emphasize the transition from wartime emergency to a fragile normality shaped by loss, rebuilt fortunes, and persistent divisions. Characters assess what can be salvaged from the past and what must be abandoned to move forward. The narrative’s focus returns to Scarlett’s will to endure and adapt, even as relationships reach critical junctures and paths diverge. Without resolving every conflict, the story underscores survival, self-reliance, and the complexities of loyalty and love amid sweeping historical change. The overall message highlights the costs of upheaval and the power of determination, leaving the future open to the choices its characters are prepared to make.
Historical Context
Set primarily in Georgia between 1861 and the early 1870s, the narrative unfolds across rural Clayton County and the burgeoning city of Atlanta. Before the war, the Piedmont landscape supported cotton plantations tied to regional markets through Atlanta’s rail nexus, where lines like the Western and Atlantic and the Georgia Railroad converged. In 1860 Atlanta counted roughly 9,500 residents and functioned as a commercial hub for the interior South. The story’s progression mirrors the arc from antebellum stability through wartime disruption to the uncertain social order of Reconstruction, anchoring personal fortunes and reversals in specific places such as Tara plantation, Atlanta’s depots and hospitals, and the charred corridors left by campaigns that tore through north and central Georgia.
The book depicts a stratified society dominated by a planter elite whose wealth depended on enslaved labor, with yeoman farmers, urban merchants, and poor whites beneath them, and enslaved African Americans forming the coerced foundation of the economy. Gender norms were rigid, valorizing white womanhood and martial honor among men, while legal and extralegal mechanisms policed race and class boundaries. Georgia’s enslaved population numbered about 462,000 in 1860, nearly half the state’s inhabitants. The plantation household, rural courthouse, church, and city market shaped daily life. Atlanta’s rapid growth and strategic rail position made it a focal point for wartime logistics and civilian mobilization, framing the settings through which the novel’s characters traverse upheaval and reconstruction.
Antebellum Georgia’s economy revolved around cotton monoculture, expanded by the 1793 cotton gin and deepened by the domestic slave trade after 1808. Counties surrounding Atlanta and southward into the coastal plain combined plantation agriculture with market access via rail and river. Legal regimes restricted enslaved movement, education, and assembly, backed by patrols and penalties. Governor Joseph E. Brown, elected in 1857, defended states’ rights and slaveholding interests. These structures explain the wealth, habits, and social certainties taken for granted at Tara and neighboring estates. The book’s opening milieu of barbecues, courtships, and hierarchical deference reflects the actual legal and economic system that anchored white planter confidence on the eve of secession.
The secession crisis followed Abraham Lincoln’s election in November 1860. South Carolina seceded on December 20, 1860; Georgia left the Union on January 19, 1861, after a convention in Milledgeville. In February 1861, delegates formed the Confederate States of America at Montgomery, Alabama, naming Jefferson Davis president and Georgia’s Alexander H. Stephens vice president. Stephens’s Cornerstone Speech on March 21, 1861, asserted slavery and racial inequality as the Confederacy’s foundation. These decisions placed Georgia at the heart of rebellion. The book’s early scenes of political excitement and martial enthusiasm echo the fervor surrounding militia musters, flag presentations, and rallies that swept plantation districts and Atlanta before the conflict’s costs became visible.
War began with Fort Sumter’s bombardment on April 12, 1861, and soon engaged Georgia militarily and industrially. Atlanta’s rail hub and workshops supplied Confederate armies; armories and depots multiplied, and troop hospitals filled warehouses and churches. Fort Pulaski guarding Savannah fell to Union rifled artillery on April 11, 1862, closing that port and tightening the blockade. Confederate conscription laws from 1862 drew white men into the ranks, while impressment requisitioned crops and livestock. The book’s depiction of Atlanta as a medical and logistical center during campaigns corresponds to the city’s documented conversion into a vast convalescent and supply complex, funneling men and materiel to fronts advancing ever closer to north Georgia.
The Union’s naval blockade, central to the Anaconda Plan, constrained Confederate imports of cloth, medicine, salt, and arms through Savannah and smaller Georgia sounds. By 1863, shortages, runaway inflation, and transportation breakdowns produced bread riots and price protests in Georgia cities such as Savannah and Augusta. Women managed households under scarcity, organized relief, and staffed hospitals. The novel’s scenes of makeshift nursing and desperate provisioning align with these home-front realities, where the sacrifice rhetoric of 1861 encountered hunger, widowhood, and loss by 1863. Atlanta’s rail-dependent markets magnified disruptions, as military priorities consumed rolling stock, and the oxygen of trade that had nourished antebellum prosperity thinned to a wartime gasp.
The Atlanta Campaign, launched by Union Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman from Chattanooga in May 1864, became decisive for Georgia. Facing Confederate Gen. Joseph E. Johnston’s Army of Tennessee, Sherman used maneuver to pry defenders from strong positions at Rocky Face Ridge and Resaca on May 13 to 15, crossing the Oostanaula and pressing south along the Western and Atlantic Railroad. Skirmishes at Cassville and New Hope Church (late May) bled the Confederate line as it fell back toward Kennesaw Mountain. Johnston favored delaying actions to preserve his army; Sherman, commanding roughly 100,000 troops in three armies, sought to turn flanks, sever rails, and edge inexorably toward Atlanta’s fortifications.
At Kennesaw Mountain on June 27, 1864, Sherman’s costly frontal assaults failed, but he soon resumed outflanking. President Davis replaced Johnston with the aggressive Gen. John Bell Hood on July 17, 1864. Hood struck at Peachtree Creek on July 20, at the Battle of Atlanta on July 22, and at Ezra Church on July 28, suffering severe casualties. Union siege lines tightened through August while cavalry raids targeted the Macon and Western and the Atlanta and West Point railroads. The culminating battle at Jonesboro on August 31 to September 1 severed the last major rail link. Confederate forces evacuated, and Union troops occupied Atlanta on September 2, 1864.
The fall of Atlanta, a national event in 1864, boosted Northern morale and influenced the U.S. presidential election. Sherman ordered the evacuation of civilians and, on November 15, 1864, set military installations and supplies ablaze, fires that spread through parts of the city as his columns marched out. Casualties for the campaign approached 32,000 Union and 35,000 Confederate. The novel’s hospital wards, civilian flight, and the conflagration consuming businesses and homes mirror these documented sieges and fires. Atlanta’s loss shattered Confederate logistics in the Deep South and transformed countless private fortunes, an inflection point the book turns into intimate drama at the city’s edge and later amid the scarred plantations of surrounding counties.
Sherman’s March to the Sea, from November 15 to December 21, 1864, sent approximately 62,000 Union soldiers in two wings through central Georgia to Savannah, living off the land under Special Field Orders No. 120 and destroying rails, mills, and depots. Troops twisted rails into Sherman’s neckties and wrecked key nodes at Griswoldville, Milledgeville, and along the Central of Georgia Railroad. Savannah fell on December 21 without major battle; Sherman gifted the city to Lincoln in a famous dispatch. Special Field Orders No. 15 in January 1865 reserved coastal lands for freedpeople. The novel’s images of stripped plantations and flight across back roads evoke the march’s material and psychological shock to rural elites.
Emancipation began as Union lines advanced following the Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863, which declared freedom in rebel-held areas as territory came under federal control. In Georgia, enslaved people fled to Union camps, established churches and schools, and joined the U.S. Colored Troops, who by war’s end numbered some 180,000 nationwide. The Thirteenth Amendment, adopted December 6, 1865, abolished slavery nationally, with Georgia’s ratification helping secure passage. The book acknowledges the upheaval of emancipation while reflecting white Southern anxieties about labor and social order. Its plantation aftermath scenes echo the uncertainty and negotiation that defined work, family reunification, and citizenship claims among newly freed communities.
Reconstruction in Georgia unfolded through competing federal and state authorities. President Andrew Johnson appointed a provisional governor in June 1865, and a convention repealed secession and repudiated Confederate debt, but Black Codes and resistance to Black civil rights soon followed. Congress imposed Military Reconstruction in March 1867; Georgia, in the Third Military District, drafted a new constitution in 1867 to 1868. Readmitted in July 1868, the state legislature expelled 28 duly elected Black members that September, prompting renewed federal intervention. After reseating Black legislators in January 1870 and ratifying the Fifteenth Amendment, Georgia secured final readmission on July 15, 1870. The novel’s depictions of political turmoil echo this cycle of provisional governance, backlash, and federal oversight.
Violence and paramilitary intimidation marked Georgia’s Reconstruction. The Ku Klux Klan, founded in 1865 in Pulaski, Tennessee, spread into Georgia by 1868, targeting Republican officials and Black voters. The Camilla Massacre of September 19, 1868, in Mitchell County, began when armed whites attacked a Republican rally, killing and wounding dozens of freedpeople and allies. Congress responded with the Enforcement Acts of 1870 and 1871, enabling federal prosecutions that temporarily curbed Klan activity. The book’s portrayal of night riders and retaliatory raids reflects these clandestine campaigns, though it filters them through white perspectives common to postwar memory, foregrounding insecurity, contested authority, and the law’s uneven reach during Reconstruction.
Postwar labor evolved into sharecropping and tenant farming across Georgia by 1866 to 1868, as land-poor freedpeople and impoverished whites contracted with landowners under crop-lien credit systems. Merchants advanced supplies at steep interest, secured by future harvests, which helped trap households in debt peonage and encouraged soil-depleting cotton planting. By 1880, nearly half of Georgia farms were operated by tenants; by 1900, roughly two thirds. Rail and warehouse networks revived cotton exports, but prosperity remained elusive for laborers. The novel’s representations of postwar scrambles for capital, lumber and mill ventures, and the collapse of plantation grandeur resonate with the economic coercion, volatility, and class recomposition produced by these arrangements.
The convict lease system, adopted in Georgia in 1868, leased prisoners to private companies for mining, brickmaking, and railroad work, including enterprises linked to figures like former governor Joseph E. Brown and, later, the Chattahoochee Brick Company under James W. English. Reports documented high mortality, brutal discipline, and the targeting of Black Georgians through vagrancy and petty crime statutes, effectively extending unfree labor into the Gilded Age. The system endured until 1908. While not foregrounded, the book’s postwar urban policing and racialized suspicion of mobility echo the punitive turn in labor control during Reconstruction and Redemption, when carceral power supplemented economic liens to rebuild the plantation order in new forms.
After 1877, Lost Cause memorialization and New South boosterism shaped public memory in Georgia. Groups such as the United Confederate Veterans, founded 1889, and the United Daughters of the Confederacy, founded 1894, sponsored monuments, textbooks, and rituals that romanticized Confederates and minimized slavery’s centrality. In Atlanta, Henry W. Grady’s New South rhetoric promoted industry while memorials sanctified the old order. The Stone Mountain carving began in the 1910s, alongside a 1915 Ku Klux Klan revival atop the mountain. Margaret Mitchell, born in Atlanta in 1900, absorbed veterans’ recollections filtered through this culture. The book reflects this commemorative environment even as it dramatizes the economic modernization that New South boosters championed.
As social and political critique, the book renders the collapse of planter power, the fragility of gender prescriptions, and the adaptive strategies demanded by war and Reconstruction. It exposes the costs of a slave-based society by tracing how war, emancipation, and federal intervention unmade fortunes and unseated hierarchies, while it also mirrors contemporaneous white Southern resentments about occupation, taxation, and political displacement. Its attention to class distinction among planters, townspeople, and poor whites highlights intraregional inequalities. At the same time, by centering white experiences and romanticizing the Old South, it reveals the limits and biases of its critique, making visible both the era’s injustices and the enduring myths that obscured them.
Author Biography
Margaret Mitchell was a twentieth-century American novelist whose singular book, Gone with the Wind, became one of the most widely read works of popular fiction in the United States. Born and raised in Atlanta, she lived and wrote in a region still grappling with memories of the Civil War and Reconstruction, contexts that shaped her subject matter and the public’s reception of her work. Her novel’s vast commercial success and long afterlife in print and on screen made her an emblematic figure of Southern letters, even though she published little else. Mitchell’s career is a case study in how one book can define an author’s public identity.
Mitchell’s education included time at a prominent women’s college in the Northeast in the late 1910s, an experience cut short by family circumstances that required her return to Atlanta. She later pursued professional work rather than advanced degrees, but her reading and self-directed study were extensive. Accounts of her formative years emphasize an immersion in regional history and storytelling traditions. Those interests, combined with exposure to popular historical romances and nineteenth-century narrative models, informed her sense of plot and character. Though not aligned with a formal literary movement, she absorbed prevailing techniques of realism and melodrama that were accessible to a mass audience.
In the early 1920s, Mitchell worked as a reporter and feature writer for the Atlanta Journal’s Sunday magazine, covering local culture and personalities. Journalism gave her practical training in interviewing, pacing, and deadlines, sharpening a direct prose style suited to narrative momentum. The role also introduced her to a broad swath of readers and topics, from theater to civic life, grounding her fiction in observed detail. A lingering injury eventually led her to leave the newsroom. During periods of convalescence, she continued to read voraciously and draft scenes, habits that later contributed to the disciplined assembly of her sole long novel.
Mitchell began composing the manuscript that became Gone with the Wind in the mid-1920s, revising it over several years. Encouraged by a visiting editor, she submitted the sprawling text to a major New York publisher, and the novel appeared in 1936. It became an immediate bestseller, celebrated for its propulsive storytelling and vividly drawn central heroine. The book received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction the following year, reinforcing its place in the national conversation. While the work’s scale and narrative drive captivated readers, its publication also signaled a moment when popular historical fiction could command extraordinary cultural attention across regions and demographics.
The novel’s themes center on survival, social upheaval, and the remaking of identity amid war and Reconstruction. Its appeal lay in a blend of romance, historical spectacle, and a brisk, reportorial eye for incident. From its earliest reception, however, critics and scholars have noted the book’s romanticization of plantation life and its portrayal of race, which draw on stereotypes and Lost Cause mythology. These elements have made the novel a frequent subject of debate, reassessment, and contextualization in classrooms and public discourse. The tension between narrative power and ideological framing continues to shape how readers and scholars approach Mitchell’s achievement.
The 1939 film adaptation amplified the novel’s reach, becoming one of the most commercially successful and culturally prominent movies of its era. The film’s scale, casting, and publicity further cemented the story in public memory, often eclipsing awareness of Mitchell’s limited published output beyond the novel itself. Despite pressure to produce a sequel, Mitchell did not publish another novel and largely withdrew from literary publicity, preferring private life. She continued to correspond with readers and attended to permissions and practical matters related to the book’s success, even as the adaptation took on an independent cultural life with its own controversies and accolades.
In her later years, Mitchell maintained a low profile, engaging in civic life in Atlanta while avoiding the role of public celebrity author. She died in the late 1940s from injuries sustained after being struck by a car, an event that shocked readers who still associated her closely with her novel’s characters and settings. Her legacy remains complex: Gone with the Wind endures as a sales phenomenon and a touchstone of American popular culture, yet it is read today with critical attention to its historical and racial framing. Scholars, educators, and readers continue to debate its meanings, ensuring its ongoing, contested place in literary history.
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[1] were. 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 sun[3]s.
Seated with Stuart and Brent Tarleton in the cool shade of the porch of Tara, 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[4]; 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 ‘wa[1q]r,’ 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 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.”
