Georgia Scott’s Reviews > Gone With the Wind > Status Update

"'How old are you, my dear? You never would tell me.'
'Twenty-eight,' she answered dully, muffled in the handkerchief.
'That's not a vast age. It's a young age to have gained the whole world and lost your own soul, isn't it? ... Ever since I've known you, you've wanted two things. Ashley and to be rich enough to tell the world to go to hell.'"

Scarlett's only twenty-eight years old at the end!

"[A]s Scarlett looked sadly back, she realized that Melanie had always been there beside her with a sword in her hand, unobtrusive as her own shadow, loving her, fighting for her with blind passionate loyalty, fighting Yankees, fire hunger, poverty, public opinion and even her beloved blood kin."

I just noticed my copy has fifty additional pages. Even accounting for typefaces, the page counts for different editions are all over the place. So...
I am much further ahead despite the crawling pace of my numbers.

"A lady, a real lady, could never hold up her head after such a night! But, stronger than shame, was the memory of rapture, of the ecstasy of surrender. For the first time in her life she had felt alive, felt passion as sweeping and primitive as the fear she had known the night she fled Atalanta, as dizzy sweet as the cold hate when she had shot the Yankee. Rhett loved her! At least, he said he loved her .... "

I should be finished but don't want this to end. Immersive isn't enough to describe it. I'm not ready to leave these characters yet

"'If you just let her scream for a night or two -'
'Let her scream!' For a moment Scarlett thought he would hit her. 'Either you are a fool or the most inhuman woman I've ever seen.'"

Scarlett - not the governess in Hollywood's version - locks Bonnie's in a darkened room. Not the first instance of Scarlett's cruelty. On the page, she's a hard one to love.

"If it were any other man in the world , I wouldn't care so much - but Rhett Butler! ... I tell you I can't bear it, seeing your fineness coarsened by him, knowing that your beauty and your charm are in the keeping of a man who - . When I think of him touching you, I - ."

He's leading her on, I tell you. Ashley in the book is more to fault than on screen.

"Frequently when she lay drowsily in Rhett's arms with the moonlight streaming over the bed, she thought how perfect life would be it were only Ashley's arms which held her so closely, if it were only Ashley who drew her black hair across his face and wrapped it about his throat."

"[Scarlett], you've been married to a boy and to an old man. And into the bargain I'll bet your mother told you that women must bear 'these things' because of the compensating joys of children. Well, that's all wrong. Why not try marrying a fine young man who has a bad reputation and a way with women. It'll be fun." At last!

"I'm sure your children won't approve of you, Scarlett...[They'll] probably be soft, prissy creatures, as the children of hard-bitten characters usually are. And to make them worse, you, like every other mother, are probably determined that they shall never know the hardships you've known. And that's all wrong. Hardships make or break people. So you'll have to wait for approval from your grandchildren."