At the center of the novel is the vivid and captivating image of the main heroine, Scarlett O’Hara. A green-eyed beauty of Irish roots—capricious and strong-willed, yet at the same time powerful and desperate—she knows how to find a way out of even the most hopeless situations. Neither romantic disappointments, nor the death of loved ones, nor the horrors of war are able to break her.
Margaret Mitchell gave Scarlett a complex, multifaceted character—decisive, stormy, and unpredictable. The heroine was born into a prosperous aristocratic planter family of Gerald O’Hara and grew up in the luxury of the slaveholding South, on the estate of Tara. From childhood she was surrounded by parental love, the envy of her sisters, and the admiring looks of young men from the neighborhood—which naturally shaped her proud and independent nature.
On the eve of the war between the South and the North, at a ball at the “Twelve Oaks” estate, Scarlett suddenly realizes that she is hopelessly in love with Ashley Wilkes, the son of the house’s owner. This becomes her first serious mistake—as with many young girls, she mistakes fiery desire for real love. However, Ashley doesn’t return her feelings. Why didn’t her charms work? Why wasn’t it she who became his wife?
The novel combines war and love, betrayal and hope, giving almost no attention to battle scenes, yet stunning with the vivid realism of its storytelling. Here are interwoven features of a historical epic, an adventure and socio-psychological novel, and melodrama. Scarlett’s fate—with her errors and victories, losses and gains, rises and falls, passion for life, love and hatred, wealth and poverty—always captivates and leaves no reader indifferent.