Some things are saved, others are forever Gone With the Wind

My next read on the list was one of my mom’s favorite books of all time, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind. I love the movie, have seen all four hours of it multiple times, but had never read the book before. The movie is wonderful, but as is so often the case, the book is even better.

If the movie is long at 4 hours, the book is longer, at over 1000 pages. It’s far too long for even an abbreviated synopsis, but basically it follows Scarlett O’Hara, the belle of Atlanta and surrounding areas, and her marriages and friends just before, during, and after the Civil War, a war which sees the the South and all of its glory destroyed. Throughout the book, we see Scarlett as a willful woman who, while not entirely bright, is still very shrewd. She knows what she wants (or at least, thinks she does) and more often that not, she gets it, sometimes through shear willpower alone.

Most of the major plot elements of the book are present in the film, sometimes with mild changes, sometimes lifted word-for-word, but the book is much more detailed overall. We can see what is going on inside Scarlett’s and Melanie’s heads (though Rhett’s is often, by design, kept a secret). Some characters in the book are omitted from the film for space’s sake, such as Will (who runs Tara in the second half and ends up marrying Suellen to save her from public outcry for her part in getting Gerald O’Hara killed, a set of events entirely changed in the film), Archie (the old, gruff convict who drives Scarlett around in Atlanta until she hires convicts at her mill), and Scarlett’s children from her first two marriages, Wade and Ella. More than anything, every action and emotion are more developed in the novel. As much life as Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable bring to Scarlett and Rhett, Mitchell’s novel allows them to evolve and grow exponentially more. And minor characters like Belle Watling, the Meades and Merriwethers, the various families around Tara, and some of the O’Hara slaves are all given more space to become real people in the book.

This novel is fantastic. Very rarely do I finish a book and immediately want to go back to page 1 and do it again. Gone With the Wind is so well written, that you cry with the characters’ hardships and cheer aloud at their good fortunes. And Mitchell writes so wonderfully that the glorious conclusion leaves us wondering if Scarlett has truly learned her lessons, has matured, or if she is still the same old Scarlett. I’ll be visiting this one again one day, and I hope that the emotions hit me as hard on the second time through as they did the first.