Since it is almost Valentine’s Day (at the time of writing this column) it’s not surprising that love is everywhere you look. Restaurants are full of heart-shaped styrofoam, greeting card companies take out full page ads in the daily newspapers, and even my favourite TV shows are inundated with sappy love songs. It’s enough to make even a hardened Valentine’s Day Scrooge like me repent a little bit and think about love. Well, love in books anyway.
And what better way to talk about love in a books column than to talk about one of the books that shaped my ideas for love and romance forever more? This is a cliched one, but Gone With The Wind by Margaret Mitchell was a major part of my formative years.
I got this book for my 13th birthday, the first “grown up” book I had ever received, and it earned me piles of rebuke in school, because I kept hiding it behind my textbooks and reading it between classes. It was the first time I had tackled a book of that considerable length, and it took me a whole week and a half to read it, after which I exhaled for the first time since I began.
You all know the story — fiesty Scarlett O’Hara fixated on namby pamby Ashley Wilkes and loved by the devastatingly handsome Rhett Butler. Oh, for love stories that could not be! Oh, for Rhett Butler turning away from Scarlett when she finally, finally realises she loves him! Oh, to be loved like that, with such devotion and passion! I think it set my standards absurdly high, so I haven’t had a romance I was fully satisfied with ever since.
When you begin Gone With The Wind, with that famous sentence, “Scarlett O’Hara was not beautiful but men seldom realised it when caught with her charm as the Tarleton twins were”, you too sort of begin to be “caught by her charms”. You cheer for her as she makes up her mind to seduce Ashley Wilkes away from the deserving but very boring Melanie, you can’t see how he can resist her, and when he does and she makes a bad marriage choice, you’re almost delighted that her young husband dies soon after.
Scarlett O’Hara is not a lovable heroine. She’s too much of a “man’s woman” not comfortable in the company of other women — perhaps because no one understands her, or admits to the same wild desires that rise up within her very unconformist brain. But you see that Rhett Butler understands her and you want them to work, even as he walks away with another famous sentence, “My dear, I don’t give a damn”, and you want to think, like Scarlett, that he will come back to her eventually. Theirs is a great love story after all, and all great love stories should have some kind of happy ending in their futures.
So, if you’re single or taken this Valentine’s, indulge yourself with a little romance from a long time ago. I know I shall.
The columnist is an author