Gone With the Wind S’more

The New York Times’ Motoko Rich reports that what had begun to seem like an impossible task is finally about to happen:

It’s taken 12 years, three authors and one rejected manuscript, but tomorrow will be another day when “Rhett Butler’s People,” the second sequel to Margaret Mitchell’s “Gone With the Wind,” is published this fall.

To those of us standing in the sidelines, the whole GWtW sequel business seems kinda ... well ... cursed. First, poor Ms. Mitchell (pictured at left) died in 1949 before anyone could convince her to write the sequel herself. (Remember that even The Eagles said they’d never reunite. Then hell froze over.)

Alexandra Ripley’s 1991 sequel, Scarlett, was a huge bestseller, though, as the NYT tells it, Scarlett has “sold more than six million copies to date worldwide — but suffered a critical drubbing.”

In 1995, the Mitchell estate got the smartypants idea to commission Emma Tennant, the British novelist who had written a sequel to Pride and Prejudice to do the same for Mitchell’s beloved and Pulitzer Prize-winning book.

When Tennant’s manuscript was turned in, the powers that be decided the book was, according to The Times, “too British in sensibility.” You hafta laff, right? I mean, why would anyone think that the GWtW sequel written by the London born daughter of the second Baron Glenconner and Elizabeth Lady Glenconner, who was educated at St Paul’s Girls school and whose best work reinvigorated several British classics, why would this writer create a book that was, ummm, kinda British in tone?

Anyway, there’s more of this sort of thing in Rich’s piece. (Actually, a fair amount more.) And The Times covers it all, blow by blow, leading up to the current pick, Donald McCaig, “a former advertising copywriter turned Virginia sheep farmer who has written well-reviewed novels about the Civil War.”

But Rhett Butler’s People isn’t actually any kind of sequel. It is, rather, a kind of extended retelling of Mitchell’s original story. This time, however, from the viewpoint of Rhett Butler. Says The Times:

The book, at a little over 400 pages, will be a slip of a novel compared with the original, which ran more than a thousand pages. “Rhett Butler’s People” covers the period from 1843 to 1874, nearly two decades more than are chronicled in “Gone With the Wind.” Readers will learn more about Rhett Butler’s childhood on a rice plantation; his relationship with Belle Watling, the brothel madam; and his experiences as a blockade runner in Charleston, S.C.

St. Martin’s Press will publish Rhett Butler’s People in November and, frankly my dears, we actually do give a damn.