![]() ![]() ![]() The Mitchell heirs, who instigated the sequel before their copyright on the 1936 book runs out in 2011, have been denounced as snake oil salesmen. And that's before learning that, for half of the book, Ripley shipped Scarlett from Georgia to Ireland. Some have called the book with the long-winded title a sacrilege to the sacred Southern Testament. Today, 900,000 copies of "Scarlett: The Sequel to Margaret Mitchell's 'Gone With the Wind' " will finally be available to the hundreds of thousands who signed up at bookstores across the country, requested it from two book clubs and ordered it in 18 languages in 40 countries. For this, she has been reviled, vilified and greatly enriched. ![]() For Ripley dared take up Margaret Mitchell's fallen pen, and write the sequel the Atlanta author never would. More than four decades later, the epic of gentle men, gracious ladies and feudal plantations has swept away Ripley's old life as surely as the Civil War did Scarlett's. What difference did it make to her life? "I wanted to be Melanie Wilkes because she was perfect." Alas, "at 13 I discovered I'd never be perfect." ![]() Alexandra Ripley, in a Southern rite of passage into womanhood, first read "Gone With the Wind" when she was 12 years old. ![]()
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