The Heroine's Bookshelf: Life Lessons, from Jane Austen to Laura Ingalls Wilder

“I won’t think of that now,” she said firmly. “If I think of it now, it will upset me. There’s no reason why things won’t come out the way I want them—if he loves me. And I know he does!”

She raised her chin and her pale, black-fringed eyes sparkled in the moonlight. Ellen had never told her that desire and attainment were two different matters; life had not taught her that the race was not to the swift. She lay in the silvery shadows with courage rising and made the plans that a sixteen-year-old makes when life has been so pleasant that defeat is an impossibility and a pretty dress and a clear complexion are weapons to vanquish fate.

Scarlett is nothing if not results-oriented, and she usually gets what she wants. Lacking in self-awareness and psychotically uninterested in the emotions or motivations of others, she uses the tools that have been given her, be they her inner grit or her mother’s green curtains. And she does so whether others accept her point of view or not. Even when it tears her up to do what she must do, she shoulders the burden of her life and moves ahead, her decisions swift, self-serving, and without compromise. This blinders-on approach is one of hard offense and unwavering defense, and defeat is not an option. Scary? Yes. Effective? Very.

Scarlett and her creator both excelled at the surprise struggle, the kind of conflict that arises when you’re looking the other way. To say that Peggy Mitchell was blind-sided by the success of Gone With the Wind, which was immediately purchased by an enthusiastic Latham, would be a gross understatement. The book she almost withheld from the world sparked a revolution in publishing, a Pulitzer Prize, worldwide translations, a movie adaptation phenomenon, and a lifetime spent swatting away gossiping relations and fame-chasing fans. Characteristically, Peggy took to this battle, shoring up her defenses and drawing her boundaries very carefully around herself. In later years, she fought for her privacy just as hard as she battled for fame, withstanding lifelong criticism of her pulpy literary methods, her racism, and her unschooled literary style. And while Gone With the Wind is nothing if not racist, manipulative, and pulpy, it’s a book I can’t quite be ashamed of reading and rereading. Can I really be expected to push against the boundaries of my own life without a bit of inspiration from literature’s most lovable bitch?

It would be easy to discard Scarlett in favor of the woman Peggy always claimed was “the real heroine” of Gone With the Wind, but I can’t see Melanie Wilkes gaining a cult following any time soon. Sure, she’s practical and saintly and dear, but she lacks the fire and impatience that make Scarlett so maddening and so marvelously brave. Where Melanie lays down her arms, Scarlett takes them up with twice as much vigor. And though Melanie is able to create happiness all around her, a heroine’s trait if ever I’ve seen one, her happiness will always lack the Technicolor clarity of the few joyful moments Scarlett allows herself.

As a modern-day heroine struggling for boring things like work-life balance and exciting ones like self- definition and -esteem, I’m always better served when I let others join me in the fight. Scarlett and Peggy both pushed others away to the detriment of their success and happiness; Scarlett, at least, pays a heavy price for her unwillingness to let others into her life. As I revisit Gone With the Wind as an adult woman, I’m shocked at the community Scarlett so selfishly discards, throwing away Melanie’s and Rhett’s unconditional love in favor of a hypothetical and ill-fated emotional bond.

But even through my disdain of Scarlett’s selfishness, I am reminded that a heroine’s most serious battles are often fought alone. Scarlett’s steely exterior hides a woman who must choose to either live inside the pain of insecurity and thwarted love or move through it. We all know which option she chooses, and we all can learn from her spectacular defeat. Her blatant willingness to leave her heart behind in favor of the battle itself is, perhaps, her greatest weakness. And I, at least, can’t help but afford it my grudging admiration, as Ashley does when Scarlett decides to put aside her emotions in favor of survival:

He remembered the way she had squared her shoulders when she turned away from him that afternoon, remembered the stubborn lift of her head. His heart went out to her, torn with his own helplessness, wrenched with admiration. He knew she had no such word in her vocabulary as gallantry, knew she would have stared blankly if he had told her she was the most gallant soul he had ever known. He knew she would not understand how many truly fine things he ascribed to her when he thought of her as gallant. He knew that she took life as it came, opposed her tough-fibered mind to whatever obstacles there might be, fought on with a determination that would not recognize defeat, and kept on fighting even when she saw defeat was inevitable.

But, for four years, he had seen others who had refused to recognize defeat, men who rode gaily into sure disaster because they were gallant. And they had been defeated, just the same.

He thought as he stared at Will in the shadowy hall that he had never known such gallantry as the gallantry of Scarlett O’Hara going forth to conquer the world in her mother’s velvet curtains and the tail feathers of a rooster.

READ THIS BOOK: 

• When the mortgage payment is (over)due

• Whenever your personal Melanie Wilkes thwarts your self-centered plans

• At the hotel you’ve spirited yourself away to for a secret, selfish staycation

SCARLETT’S LITERARY SISTERS: 

• Any heroine in The Portable Dorothy Parker, by Dorothy Parker

• Christabel LaMotte and Maud Bailey in Possession, by A. S. Byatt

• Lily Bart in The House of Mirth, by Edith Wharton

Chapter 8 Compassion

Scout Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird,

by Harper Lee

“An’ they chased him ‘n’ never could catch him ‘cause they didn’t know what he looked like, an’ Atticus, when they finally saw him, why he hadn’t done any of those things… Atticus, he was real nice….”“Most people are, Scout, when you finally see them.”

HARPER LEE, TO KILL A MOCKINCBIRD

A girl may be born with grit, faith, or happiness, but compassion is an advanced heroine skill, one that’s usually drummed into you by circumstance, life, and error. It’s one of those qualities that’s easier to understand once you’ve collected a bruise or two, something that comes with practice, not will. It helps to be an outsider like Nelle Harper Lee, a woman who learned her compassion while filling a permanent seat on the sidelines of Southern life.

Monroeville, Alabama, did not place a high premium on compassion or modernity or anything, for that matter, but tradition. Even in the 1930s, the town had barely managed to embrace electricity. For Nelle, its streets were as familiar as the flour sacks from which her poor classmates’ clothing was made, its pace as slow as a wound-down metronome.

Nelle learned about the sidelines in her awkward role as the tomboy who clashed with her parents and could never really fit in at school. The fact that she had taken Truman Streckfus Persons, an effeminate neighbor boy, under her wing when she was eight years old did not help. Both were destined to become literary legends, Harper as a literary enigma and Truman Capote as the enfant terrible of American letters. But for the time being, they were a weird, ugly little couple, occupying the farthest outskirts of school society.

Life at home had little of the uproarious fun she manufactured with Truman. Nelle had to watch her father, Amasa “A. C.” Lee, deal with her mother as she progressed from sickly to downright mentally ill. Every inch the