Gone with the Wind recap

On the eve of the Civil War, willful Georgia belle Scarlett O'Hara loves the genteel Ashley Wilkes, but he marries his gentle cousin Melanie, and Scarlett weds another man out of spite. Widowed young, she waits out the war in Atlanta, crossing paths again and again with the cynical blockade-runner Rhett Butler. When the city falls, she escapes the flames, delivers Melanie's baby, and returns to find her family's plantation, Tara, ruined and her mother dead. Vowing never to be hungry again, she claws her way back to wealth through two more marriages and hard, scandalous business dealing, at last marrying Rhett. Their union is stormy, held together mainly by their doted-on daughter, Bonnie. When Bonnie dies and then Melanie too, Scarlett finally sees that she has loved Rhett all along, but he has been worn past caring and leaves her. Undefeated, she turns back toward Tara to plan how to win him again.

In the spring of 1861, on the O'Hara cotton plantation of Tara in north Georgia, sixteen-year-old Scarlett O'Hara learns that the young planter she loves, Ashley Wilkes, is to marry his gentle cousin Melanie Hamilton. At a lavish barbecue at the Wilkes estate of Twelve Oaks, Scarlett corners Ashley and confesses her feelings, but he will not break with Melanie. Her furious outburst is overheard by Rhett Butler, a worldly, disreputable outsider who is unmoved by the region's eager talk of war. As the men rush to enlist after the firing on Fort Sumter, a wounded and spiteful Scarlett impulsively accepts the proposal of Melanie's shy brother, Charles Hamilton, and marries him, more to wound Ashley than out of any affection.

Scarlett's marriage is brief: Charles dies of illness in camp soon after the war begins, leaving her a resentful teenage widow with an infant son and none of the freedom she craved. Chafing at mourning, she goes to Atlanta to stay with Melanie and the fluttery Aunt Pittypat. There the bustling wartime city suits her restless energy, though widowhood forbids the gaiety she loves. At a charity bazaar she scandalizes society by dancing with the blockade-runner Rhett Butler, who reappears in her life and takes open, teasing pleasure in her company, seeing through her pretenses as no one else does. As the Confederacy's early confidence gives way to hardship and lengthening casualty lists, Scarlett waits out the war among people whose values she does not share, still secretly fixed on the absent Ashley.

As the war turns disastrous, Atlanta is besieged and shelled. Scarlett, held there by a promise to care for the pregnant Melanie, helps deliver Melanie's baby with almost no aid as the city falls. Rhett spirits the little group out through the burning streets, then abandons Scarlett on the road to join the doomed army, and she drives a broken-down wagon home through a ravaged countryside. She reaches Tara to find her mother dead, her father's mind shattered by grief, and the plantation stripped and starving. Vowing that she will never be hungry again, Scarlett takes brutal command of the family's survival, even killing a marauding deserter who threatens the house. Through back-breaking labor and ruthless will she keeps Tara alive amid the wreckage of the defeated South.

In the poverty of Reconstruction, a heavy new tax threatens Tara. Determined to save it, Scarlett steals her sister Suellen's staid merchant beau, Frank Kennedy, and marries him for his money. She shocks Atlanta by running Frank's store and buying a sawmill, driving hard bargains and dealing openly with Yankees and profiteers to rebuild her fortune, while Rhett lends her money and needles her about her methods. Her father dies, and she grows harder and richer as respectable society turns against her. After Scarlett is attacked while traveling alone, Frank rides out with a night raid of vigilantes to answer the insult and is killed. Widowed again, Scarlett is soon courted by Rhett, who proposes, and, half in love and half for security, she accepts.

Scarlett and Rhett marry, and his wealth gives her every luxury, but she cannot let go of her old dream of Ashley, and their marriage becomes a battle of pride. Their spirited daughter, Bonnie Blue, is the one person Rhett loves without reserve. When Scarlett is found in an innocent but compromising embrace with Ashley, Melanie refuses to believe any wrong and stands by her. Then tragedy strikes: Bonnie is killed in a riding accident, and the loss shatters both parents and the last thing that bound them. Melanie dies after a failed pregnancy, and only as she loses her does Scarlett realize that her long devotion to Ashley was an illusion and that she truly loves Rhett. She understands too late. Worn out and disillusioned, Rhett leaves her, indifferent to her pleading. Alone, Scarlett resolves to go back to Tara to gather her strength and find a way to win him back, trusting that tomorrow is another day.

By the end, Scarlett has survived war, poverty, and three marriages and rebuilt her fortune, but her personal life collapses. Her marriage to Rhett Butler, long poisoned by her clinging to a romantic ideal of Ashley Wilkes, holds together mostly through their shared love for their daughter, Bonnie Blue. Bonnie's death in a riding accident destroys that last bond. Soon after, the saintly Melanie dies following a dangerous pregnancy, and in losing her Scarlett finally recognizes two truths at once: that Ashley was never the man she imagined and cannot manage without Melanie, and that the person she has truly loved is Rhett. She turns to him only to find him emptied of feeling, no longer willing to keep fighting for a wife who never valued him; he leaves, telling her plainly that he no longer cares. Left alone in Atlanta, Scarlett refuses despair. She fixes her thoughts on Tara, the land that has always restored her, and resolves to return there and find some way to bring Rhett back, certain that tomorrow will give her another chance.