Gone with the wind краткое содержание на английском
Обновлено: 03.07.2024
I 've recently read a book, which has made a very deep impression on me. It is called Gone with the Wind. The author of the book is Margaret Mitchell. She was born in Atlanta, Georgia, in a family of the president of the Atlanta Historical Society. All the family was interested in American history and she grew up in an atmosphere of stories about the Civil War.
After graduating from the college Margaret Mitchell worked for a time for the Atlanta Journal. In 1925 she got married. In the following ten years she put on paper all the stories she had heard about the Civil War. The result was Gone with the Wind. It was first published in 1936 and became the talking point of all America. In 1939 the book was made into a highly successful film. Vivien Leigh and Clark Торца played the leading roles. Vivien Leigh won the Oscar. Everyone loved her high-spirited and beautiful heroine, Scarlett o'hara.
The story is set around the time of the American Civil War (1861 - 1865), when the Southern states went to war with the North to defend their way of life. It was a way of life in which rich gentry lived in large houses and owned huge areas of land, cultivated by black slaves. Scarlett o'hara was born in one of those rich houses.
But Gone with the Wind is also about a love triangle. While Scarlett loves the quiet, gentlemanly Ashley Wilkes, the wild and decidedly ungentlemanly Rhett Butler is in love with her.
In 1991, a publishing company asked Alexandra Ripley, a historical novelist, to write the continuation of the story. Her novel Scarlett was not in the same class as the original. Critics have been writing very bad reviews of Scarlett, but the book is popular with the public.
impression [ɪm'preʃ(ə)n] - впечатления
Civil ['sivɪl] War - гражданская война
high-spirited ['haɪ spɪrɪtɪd] - отважный, пылкий
to defend [dɪ'fend] - защищать
gentry ['d ʒ entrɪ] - джентри, мелкопоместное дворянство
to own [əun] - владеть
gentlemanly ['d ʒ entlmənlɪ] - воспитанный, вежливый;
джентльменский wild [waɪld] - безумный, дикий
decidedly [dɪ'saɪdɪdlɪ] - явно
review [rɪ'vju:] - обзор, рецензия, отзыв
1. What do you think made Margaret Mitchell write a book about the Civil War?
2. Who starred in the film "Gone with the Wind"? Was the film successful?
3. Who are the main characters of the book "Gone with the Wind"?
4. What is the story set around?
5. What can you say about Scarlett O 'Hara ?
6. Is the book popular with the public?
Действие происходит во время Гражданской войны (1861 - 1865), когда Южные штаты начали войну с Севером, чтобы защитить свой образ жизни. Этот образ жизни заключался в том, что богачи жили в больших домах и владели огромными участками земли, которые обрабатывали черные рабы. Скарлетт о'хара родилась в одном из таких богатых домов.
into something that will help them get ahead in life. These are the born survivors.
Those who are not born survivors are lacking that one key element; they don't have the need or the want to get down and
dirty and get the job done. Most of these people will either fall through the cracks or they will live out the rest of their
lives on a hand to mouth basis. They aren't able to look ahead, to plan, to scrimp and scavenge and do whatever it takes to
survive. Most of the Southern gentlemen in Gone With the Wind are not born survivors. "And raising good cotton, riding
well, shooting straight, dancing lightly, squiring the ladies with elegance and carrying one's liquor like a gentleman were the
things that mattered " (4).
One such gentleman is Ashley Wilkes. While Ashley is adept at the things that matter, he " was born of a line of men who
used their leisure for thinking, not doing, for spinning brightly colored dreams that had in them no touch of reality " (26).
Ashley comes home from the war a changed person. He tries to help Scarlett and the others with the farm work, but he just
isn't able. " 'I wonder not only what will become of us at Tara but what will become of everybody in the South ' " (526).
" 'In the end what will happen will be what has happened whenever a civilization breaks up. The people who have brains
and courage come through and the one's who haven't are winnowed out ' " (527). Ashley realizes that he doesn't belong in
this new life, the new South. He knows that he is out of place and it scares him.
While Ashley Wilkes is scared of his new life, Scarlett O' Hara is not. " ' You, Scarlett are taking life by the horns and
twisting it to your will ' " (529). Early in the story Scarlett is portrayed as a pampered Southern belle. Her soft white
hands are soon calloused and freckled, though. Scarlett does everything when the war is over. Her mother is dead, so
Scarlett not only does the menial work, but she also supervises the household as well. " ' I've struggled for food and for
money and I've weeded and hoed and picked cotton and I've even plowed until I can't stand it another minute ' " (531).
Scarlett does stand it however, because she is a born survivor and she will stand anything to keep her land and her folks safe.
Later in the story, Scarlett is living in Atlanta. She buys two saw mills as a money making project, because she is still
needing to survive. Scarlett is willing to risk social standing to survive; because she is successful the matrons of society
look down on her. Rhett Butler tells Scarlett, " ' All you've done is be different from other women and you've made a little
success at it. As I've told you before, that is the unforgivable sin in any society. Be different and be damned! Scarlett, the
mere fact that you've made a success of your mill is an insult to every man who hasn't succeeded ' " (678). Scarlett, a born
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Gone with the Wind: краткое содержание, описание и аннотация
The greatest love story of our time, the story of Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler… Margaret Mitchell’s monumental epic of the South won a Pulitzer Prize, gave rise to the most popular motion picture of our time, and inspired a sequel that became the fastest selling novel of the century. It is one of the most popular books ever written; more than 28 million copies of the book have been sold in more than 37 countries. Today, more than half a century after its initial publication, its achievements are unparalleled, and it remains the most revered American saga and the most beloved work by an American writer…
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Gone with the Wind
Scarlett O’Hara was not beautiful, but men seldom realized it when caught by her charm as the Tarleton twins were. In her face were too sharply blended the delicate features of her mother, a Coast aristocrat of French descent, and the heavy ones of her florid Irish father. But it was an arresting face, pointed of chin, square of jaw. Her eyes were pale green without a touch of hazel, starred with bristly black lashes and slightly tilted at the ends. Above them, her thick black brows slanted upward, cutting a startling oblique line in her magnolia-white skin—that skin so prized by Southern women and so carefully guarded with bonnets, veils and mittens against hot Georgia suns.
Seated with Stuart and Brent Tarleton in the cool shade of the porch of Tara, her father’s plantation, that bright April afternoon of 1861, she made a pretty picture. Her new green flowered-muslin dress spread its twelve yards of billowing material over her hoops and exactly matched the flat-heeled green morocco slippers her father had recently brought her from Atlanta. The dress set off to perfection the seventeen-inch waist, the smallest in three counties, and the tightly fitting basque showed breasts well matured for her sixteen years. But for all the modesty of her spreading skirts, the demureness of hair netted smoothly into a chignon and the quietness of small white hands folded in her lap, her true self was poorly concealed. The green eyes in the carefully sweet face were turbulent, willful, lusty with life, distinctly at variance with her decorous demeanor. Her manners had been imposed upon her by her mother’s gentle admonitions and the sterner discipline of her mammy; her eyes were her own.
On either side of her, the twins lounged easily in their chairs, squinting at the sunlight through tall mint-garnished glasses as they laughed and talked, their long legs, booted to the knee and thick with saddle muscles, crossed negligently. Nineteen years old, six feet two inches tall, long of bone and hard of muscle, with sunburned faces and deep auburn hair, their eyes merry and arrogant, their bodies clothed in identical blue coats and mustard-colored breeches, they were as much alike as two bolls of cotton.
Outside, the late afternoon sun slanted down in the yard, throwing into gleaming brightness the dogwood trees that were solid masses of white blossoms against the background of new green. The twins’ horses were hitched in the driveway, big animals, red as their masters’ hair; and around the horses’ legs quarreled the pack of lean, nervous possum hounds that accompanied Stuart and Brent wherever they went. A little aloof, as became an aristocrat, lay a black-spotted carriage dog, muzzle on paws, patiently waiting for the boys to go home to supper.
Between the hounds and the horses and the twins there was a kinship deeper than that of their constant companionship. They were all healthy, thoughtless young animals, sleek, graceful, high-spirited, the boys as mettlesome as the horses they rode, mettlesome and dangerous but, withal, sweet-tempered to those who knew how to handle them.
Although born to the ease of plantation life, waited on hand and foot since infancy, the faces of the three on the porch were neither slack nor soft. They had the vigor and alertness of country people who have spent all their lives in the open and troubled their heads very little with dull things in books. Life in the north Georgia county of Clayton was still new and, according to the standards of Augusta, Savannah and Charleston, a little crude. The more sedate and older sections of the South looked down their noses at the up-country Georgians, but here in north Georgia, a lack of the niceties of classical education carried no shame, provided a man was smart in the things that mattered. And raising good cotton, riding well, shooting straight, dancing lightly, squiring the ladies with elegance and carrying one’s liquor like a gentleman were the things that mattered.
In these accomplishments the twins excelled, and they were equally outstanding in their notorious inability to learn anything contained between the covers of books. Their family had more money, more horses, more slaves than any one else in the County, but the boys had less grammar than most of their poor Cracker neighbors.
It was for this precise reason that Stuart and Brent were idling on the porch of Tara this April afternoon. They had just been expelled from the University of Georgia, the fourth university that had thrown them out in two years; and their older brothers, Tom and Boyd, had come home with them, because they refused to remain at an institution where the twins were not welcome. Stuart and Brent considered their latest expulsion a fine joke, and Scarlett, who had not willingly opened a book since leaving the Fayetteville Female Academy the year before, thought it just as amusing as they did.
“I know you two don’t care about being expelled, or Tom either,” she said. “But what about Boyd? He’s kind of set on getting an education, and you two have pulled him out of the University of Virginia and Alabama and South Carolina and now Georgia. He’ll never get finished at this rate.”
“Oh, he can read law in Judge Parmalee’s office over in Fayetteville,” answered Brent carelessly. “Besides, it don’t matter much. We’d have had to come home before the term was out anyway.”
“The war, goose! The war’s going to start any day, and you don’t suppose any of us would stay in college with a war going on, do you?”
“You know there isn’t going to be any war,” said Scarlett, bored. “It’s all just talk. Why, Ashley Wilkes and his father told Pa just last week that our commissioners in Washington would come to—to—an—amicable agreement with Mr. Lincoln about the Confederacy. And anyway, the Yankees are too scared of us to fight. There won’t be any war, and I’m tired of hearing about it.”
“Not going to be any war!” cried the twins indignantly, as though they had been defrauded.
“Why, honey, of course there’s going to be a war,” said Stuart. “The Yankees may be scared of us, but after the way General Beauregard shelled them out of Fort Sumter day before yesterday, they’ll have to fight or stand branded as cowards before the whole world. Why, the Confederacy—”
Scarlett made a mouth of bored impatience.
“If you say ‘war’ just once more, I’ll go in the house and shut the door. I’ve never gotten so tired of any one word in my life as ‘war,’ unless it’s ‘secession.’ Pa talks war morning, noon and night, and all the gentlemen who come to see him shout about Fort Sumter and States’ Rights and Abe Lincoln till I get so bored I could scream! And that’s all the boys talk about, too, that and their old Troop. There hasn’t been any fun at any party this spring because the boys can’t talk about anything else. I’m mighty glad Georgia waited till after Christmas before it seceded or it would have ruined the Christmas parties, too. If you say ‘war’ again, I’ll go in the house.”
She meant what she said, for she could never long endure any conversation of which she was not the chief subject. But she smiled when she spoke, consciously deepening her dimple and fluttering her bristly black lashes as swiftly as butterflies’ wings. The boys were enchanted, as she had intended them to be, and they hastened to apologize for boring her. They thought none the less of her for her lack of interest. Indeed, they thought more. War was men’s business, not ladies’, and they took her attitude as evidence of her femininity.
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PART ONE
CHAPTER I
Scarlett O’Hara was not beautiful, but men seldom realized it when caught by her charm as the Tarleton twins were.
In her face were too sharply blended the delicate features of her mother, a Coast aristocrat of French descent, and the heavy ones of her florid Irish father.
Her eyes were pale green without a touch of hazel, starred with bristly black lashes and slightly tilted at the ends.
Above them, her thick black brows slanted upward, cutting a startling oblique line in her magnolia-white skin — that skin so prized by Southern women and so carefully guarded with bonnets, veils and mittens against hot Georgia suns.
Seated with Stuart and Brent Tarleton in the cool shade of the porch of Tara, her father’s plantation, that bright April afternoon of 1861, she made a pretty picture.
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