What would have happened in Gone With the Wind if Ashley had married Scarlett? If Scarlett had matured in that marriage and later met Rhett? If Melanie had truly, deeply loved Ashley but hadn’t married him?
These were some questions my dear friend SM posed to me while recommending this book to me to read. She is part of a book club that just read this book, and she, knowing my taste in books well, wanted to acquaint me with this author and book. She and I are both fans of Gone With the Wind and think that the love-story of Rhett and Scarlett is almost without peer in the literary world. So it was with great interest that I discussed (not having yet read Green Dolphin Country) the above questions about Mitchell’s famous characters and had my interest piqued to read Elizabeth Goudge’s work.
I picked up my 1944 hardback copy at my local library. From looking on Amazon, there are quite a few options and editions for purchase, and I would definitely pick this book up if I saw a nice hardback edition for sale at a local bookstore.
Elizabeth Goudge (1900-1984) was a contemporary of Margaret Mitchell’s, and her work shows much the same flavor as Mitchell’s. Both are set in the mid-1800s, both center on two women, sisters actually, and the single man they both love… but Green Dolphin Country pairs the stronger Marianne with the man she has loved, William, who is much weaker in ambition than she, while the woman HE truly loves, and who TRULY loves him back, is left behind. Marianne meets her Rhett in the wilds of New Zealand, but because of her jealous love of William, doesn’t allow herself to pursue it. The book culminates with a happiness of understanding between the two characters center to the storyline, but I did leave saddened that they neither one had found true marital understanding until the very end of their lives, and so they had never truly been happy.
All in all, I would give this book a rating of five out of five stars, it had parts that were truly beautiful bits of writing (SM and I agree that one of our favorite passages describes the girls’ childhood walled garden!) and there is a wholeness of character development that was the standard in old literature that has been lost in most current stuff.
I started Green Dolphin Street, but got bored, so I flipped to the last few pages and read them and decided to not finish. 🙂
I have the book and mean to trudge through it someday. I do like the garden description. too.
Assume the book’s better than the movie: after seeing it, I wouldn’t give the book one out of five. I could sympathize with Marianne’s frustration with the limited sphere accorded to women, but she was egocentric, controlling and dishonest — and she didn’t love the man, she was obsessed with him. The ending was pure schmaltz: Hollywood at its most Moral Majority. My idea of a romance would have been Marianne finding a man who understood her and appreciated her and loved her enough to give her scope for her talents. Instead, the writer implies that the mistake was God seeing to it that the nice man got the woman he needed to goad him into becoming wealthy. Nice to know it’s okay to completely louse up other people’s lives provided you’re successful at using them to make money.
Maybe it would have been better with another actress in the role? Vivien Leigh at least made Scarlett sympathetic. Turner just makes Marianne a wooden-faced, self-absorbed control freak whose supposed moment of revelation comes across as a temper tantrum — and an inexplicable tantrum, at that, since she always knew that William loved Marguerite, and any woman with half her supposed brilliance would have known there was something up when he met her at the boat.
I haven’t seen the movie, but I felt that the book did a pretty good job of explaining how Marianne was obsessed with William, and that she basically sold her soul to get what she wanted. There IS redemption at the end, in and that the truth about it all comes out.