Scarlett; by Alexandra Ripley.

Everyone would have had a different way of imagining how to extend the popular story, and so the heirs appointed someone of choice, and while the first few pages disappoint in style and substance - Margaret Mitchell's Scarlett was fire and spirit, she might lose but did not take humiliations like a woman is expected to, meekly - the later parts do very well in both ways.

The original told about the civil war and reconstruction in Georgia, both rural and Atlanta, where this sequel takes off and goes into neighbouring states where Scarlett has relatives, and her experience of the reconstruction years there and her spirited dealings with people. Then it shifts to her ancestral Ireland and to Tara, which her childhood home was named after, and deals with history happening there, with Scarlett playing multiple roles.

Ripley is victim to the recent decades of misogynistic pervading atmosphere of her nation (and the world for that matter, but one does get to be led to expect better of US) in general, and the relentless vilification of Scarlett O'Hara in particular, never mind she worked hard to nurse and feed people she need not have taken responsibility of at all, never mind she endangered her own life in attempting to run a business successfully where men failed more than not. Ripley has her thrown out of her own house - left to her by her first husband and the father of her son - by a woman who has survived on her charity basically for years while vilifying her, and the fact that Scarlett did not throw this in her face in public or even think of it is only a small part of her natural nobility that goes unnoticed (except by Melanie in GWTW who is dead when this book begins) even as Ripley proceeds along the lines of Mitchell (who had Scarlett disinvest in the mills that were a symbol of her own achievement to her) in having Scarlett proceed to spend all her own earnings through the years of occupation, danger, strife, on charity to the Wilkes clan, even as she is abused and ill used by Miss Wilkes - who, as Melanie pointed out uncannily correctly, hates Scarlett due to her own being never married and not likely to marry as she is over twenty five and not attractive. Scarlett takes all this abuse, proceeds to set up a dual charity to support the Wilkeses, before leaving town.

This is basically Ripley catering to the hatred that such an achiever and a noble woman as Scarlett invokes in the hearts of ordinary women full of ill will that rule the gossip circles of public, since the expectation was that women - and the gossiping, back biting women at that - will form the basic readership of this book. So they had to be catered to by having the noble spirited Scarlett be treated horribly and taking it in a noble cause of charity to the Wilkeses.

If you wish to know about her love life, read this for yourself.