Word: ripley
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Where it has remained on rusting hinges until last week. Scarlett (Warner Books; 823 pages; $24.95), the carefully prepared, shrewdly promoted novel by Alexandra Ripley, is finally out in the U.S. and 40 other countries. Warner Books paid $4.9 million for the American rights and has backed up its bet with print orders totaling nearly 1 million copies. The William Morris Agency, representing Ripley and the Margaret Mitchell estate, sold the foreign rights for $5 million more. William Morris' Robert Gottlieb believes film rights could sell in the "high seven figures." Scarlett is the first published sequel to Gone With...
...shrewdly expands her Atlanta business interests and plots her slippery husband's recapture. For those who were on Mars last week, the most famous bickerers in literature since Petruchio and Katharina get back together again. Although her contract with Mitchell's estate provides for a sequel to the sequel, Ripley says she will not write it. But tomorrow is another...
Once again publicity foreplay is more exciting than what goes on between the covers. The managed anticipation that preceded Scarlett's publication was enlivened by the intricacies of copyright law and the persistent, though unconfirmed, rumor that Sidney Sheldon had been a candidate before the Mitchell estate settled on Ripley, 57, a native of Charleston, S.C., and author of three solid historical romances. There was also the confirmed rumor that Ripley threatened to quit when told by her editor that the first draft of Scarlett was not commercial enough. Finally, there was the author's disarming candor. "Margaret Mitchell...
...takes the reader only a few pages to realize that Ripley has had to / forfeit the novelist's right to create her own characters. Rhett Butler and Scarlett O'Hara sprang from everything Mitchell knew and felt about a time that was still fresh in her region's memory. Ripley's self-imposed handicap shows in the dialogue. Mitchell gave her sardonic hero the best lines, hard- bitten and vivid in the Raymond Chandler style. "I've seen eyes like yours above a dueling pistol," he says to Scarlett. "They evoke no ardor in the male breast." Ripley's Rhett...
...Scarlett wants to get in touch with her Irish roots, and Ripley wants to get her away from the freed slaves and budding Klansmen of the Reconstruction South. Pushing a complex reality under the Old Sod solves the problem of having to create substantial roles for black characters. When hired to write the book, Ripley insisted on a contemporary treatment of race, specifically the avoidance of dialect. Her method is to retain speech patterns while providing elocution lessons...