Word: ripley
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Before Alexandra Ripley presents this not-so-astonishing revelation in Scarlett: The Sequel to Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind, the author hauls Scarlett from Tara to Atlanta to Charleston to Savannah, finally depositing the nomadic heroine in Ireland for 500 pages before allowing her to recapture Rhett...
...Scarlett, Ripley leaves the South behind to explore the conflict between the Irish and the British in the 1870's, as witnessed by a Southern belle with Irish blood. The effect is less than enthralling. Scarlett lived and breathed the South in Gone with the Wind; in Scarlett, she is essentially a spectator in a far less interesting saga...
...Ripley tries to update the tone of the novel--she carefully avoids using dialect for her black characters and evades the topic of race relations after the war entirely. In order to do so, Ripley ships Scarlett off to Ireland to discover her roots. Unfortunately, the South which Scarlett leaves has been incorrectly reconstructed by Ripley. The graceful antebellum South which Ripley depicts, full of honor and traditions and social proprieties, was destroyed by the Civil...
Southerners did their best to keep the Old South alive after the Confederate defeat, but they were not nearly as successful as Ripley would have the reader believe. Except for an occasional economic upheaval, the war appears not to have ravaged the lives and souls of Ripley's characters...
While Scarlett errs on the side of political correctness, Gone With the Wind -- its minstrel-show dialogue intact -- still sells like buttermilk biscuits. The irony does not seem to disturb the Mitchell estate. Ripley, a seasoned professional, apparently understood what she was getting paid so well to do: write the book that was doomed from conception to be endlessly compared to the original. Scarlett is the South's new Lost Cause...