Spoiler warning: This review discusses the ending of the book.
I have actually read Scarlett twice. The first time was probably around 2009 or 2010, not long after I had finished Gone with the Wind. And I did not like it very much.
I picked it up for the obvious reason: I desperately wanted a sequel to Gone with the Wind. I was never satisfied with Rhett walking away and Scarlett deciding that tomorrow was another day. I wanted the happy ending. I wanted to know that somehow Scarlett would get Rhett back and they would finally sort themselves out.
Margaret Mitchell never wrote that sequel, but decades later Alexandra Ripley was chosen by Mitchell’s estate to write an authorized continuation. Unfortunately, when I first read it, Gone with the Wind was still too fresh in my mind. The difference between Margaret Mitchell’s writing and Alexandra Ripley’s was immediately noticeable to me. However officially authorized Scarlett might have been, it didn’t feel like the same story written by the same hand.
Then the story eventually moves a substantial part of Scarlett’s life to Ireland. That felt particularly strange to me the first time around. I had spent Gone with the Wind so firmly rooted in Georgia, Tara and the American South that suddenly transporting Scarlett into an almost entirely different world made the sequel feel even further removed from the original. At the time, I probably would have given it about 2.5 stars.
And yet I read it again in 2020 and gave it four. What changed? Mostly me, I think. 😄 By then, many years had passed since I had read Gone with the Wind. I no longer had Margaret Mitchell’s writing style sitting fresh in my head, so I wasn’t constantly comparing every page of Scarlett with the original. This time I could read it more as its own story. And perhaps that is the best way to read it.
Calling Scarlett the sequel to Gone with the Wind gives it an enormous burden that I don’t think it can completely carry. Even though it is the authorized sequel, in places it still feels to me rather like very elaborate, officially sanctioned fan fiction. But once I stopped expecting another Margaret Mitchell novel, I enjoyed it much more.
Most importantly, it gave me the thing I had wanted all those years ago. Scarlett and Rhett do eventually find their way back to one another. Is it the ending Margaret Mitchell would have written? We can never know. But it was the happy ending I had wanted after finishing Gone with the Wind, and on my second reading I was much more willing to simply enjoy getting it. Sometimes apparently a book deserves a second chance. At least this one did for me.