Margaret Mitchell's Classic Novel 'Gone With the Wind'

Philip Dickinson: Oh my! How to review this monstrous classic?! I went into this with an open mind. I've never seen the film and I avoided reading reviews because I didn't want to be influenced by anything other than the book.

This seemed like two stories to me. Two stories that were intertwined. The first story is about Scarlett O'Hara, the most selfish, spoiled, self-centred and wilfully ignorant person you can possibly imagine. The second story is about what the American Civil war did to 'The South', and specifically the state of Georgia, and even more specifically the town/city of Atlanta.

Story One - Right off the bat, I despised sixteen year old Scarlett. She lives a pampered, charmed life and is not required to think for herself. All she cares about is looking attractive and gaining attention of the young men in the area, usually running rough-shod over the feelings of the men and of the other girls in the vicinity who might otherwise be her friends. I expected this to a certain extent, and I hoped the real story would cover an arc in which she would grow up and learn to be a decent, rounded individual. I was disappointed in that respect. Although she learns to knuckle down and...

United Kingdom on Oct 01, 2023

Belinda: Good to read

United Kingdom on Sep 20, 2023

Niigata dweller: I have read this book in many languages. However, the original language is still the Best! Story of love, history, and psychology of people without social media.

Japan on Aug 16, 2023

John B.: Read this for the first time recently after watching the film many times. There are one or two small storyline differences in the book and two significant events, such as the two children Scarlett bore to Charles Hamilton and Frank Kennedy, but these events and characters hardly affect the story. Otherwise novel and film reflect each other accurately.

United Kingdom on Jun 22, 2023

Literature_lover: I bought this book primarily because I am a huge fan of the film. To be honest, I wasn't expecting to be bowled over and sort of imagined a Mills Boon/Jilly Cooper type read - entertaining but not particularly substantial. Well, I was wrong. For context, my usual novels of choice are classics so I was pleasantly surprised to find this wouldn't be completely out of one with those.

First clue is this book actually won the Pultizer Prize - so whilst it's not seen as 'serious' writing in our time, it was considered a masterpiece back in the day, the great American novel, etc. Yes, times were different then but I find it slightly sad that the book's reputation has fallen somewhat. Whilst it probably not 'top tier' next to the greats of Fitzgerald, Salinger, Dickens and so on, it's not a million miles away and to be honest, far better written than a lot of highly acclaimed novels today.

To get over the inevitable - yes the book is racist. The KKK do feature but they are not seem as wholly positive - while some characters are in favour, interestingly our heroine and hero do not think highly of them. Yes, the n word is used and whenever a black person speaks their speech is...

United Kingdom on Jun 30, 2018

M. Hughes: Say what you want about political correctness (or lack thereof). It's all ridiculous anyway, because this book was written in a different age and about a different age. At its heart, this book is an intimate look at the American Civil War from a Southerner's perspective. And it's also got a whopping great (doomed) romance.

I grew up for 10 years in Chicago and then when I was nearly 11, we moved to a rural area in South Carolina. A few years later we moved to a small town in North Georgia. My father was from Philadelphia, but my mother and stepfather were Georgians. I always considered myself a hybrid, but I was the only one who thought so. Northerners ridiculed the soft drawl I picked up from my Georgian family; Southerners ridiculed my Northern speech patterns and LACK of a proper drawl. This was in the 1960s and 1970s. So tell me that nobody remembered the Civil War anymore. In both North and South a mere hundred years later, it defined a great many of my own relationships. In the North, elementary school history was all about the evil South and the the evils of slavery. When I got to the evil South--to a fully integrated school (as opposed to the totally white suburb of...

United States on Dec 06, 2015

Rhonda Elkins: When I first read Gone with the wind many years ago at age 25, I had watched the movie many times and loved it. Then when I read the book, I fell in love with it hailing it as the best book I'd ever read in my life. At that time though, I did find the in depth descriptions of the surroundings and of backgrounds of people a little tedious. Other than that, I loved it and my lifelong love of Civil War history was started right then and there. As the years went by and I read so many more books, a few years ago there began to be other books that took the title of "best book" in my eyes, always keeping that great love of GWTW in my heart. However, at age 52, I decided to read it again. It just called to me for some reason. This time, I loved it even so much more than I did then, and what I disliked about it years ago, the descriptive writing of Margaret Mitchell, is one of the things I loved about it most of all. It takes a tremendous amount of talent for a writer to totally immerse the reader into the setting they have created, when they can just see the lush beauty, the red clay, the desolation, the dying wounded, everything that was written, you lived it, smelled it, and felt it. I...

United States on Feb 02, 2013