Some of the girls and I watched Vanity Fair tonight. I told them as we watched that the movie reminded me of Gone With the Wind. There’s a good girl and a bad girl. The bad girl is willing to do whatever she must to survive and to thrive. Of course, there’s a war to get through, and a fallen hero who’s not really much of a hero at all–just as Melanie’s precious Ashley, although he survives the war, isn’t much of a hero either. The scene where the two pregnant women are fleeing Brussells as the enemy invades was quite reminiscent of the burning of Atlanta. Scarlett and Rhett, Becky and Rawdon, both couples deserve each other. And the men both finally see that reforming their respective spouses is hopeless. I thought about all this as I enjoyed a very well made movie.

Lo and behold, the girls watched some extra material that was on the DVD, and someone said that Margaret Mitchell, author of Gone WIth the Wind, read Thackeray’s Vanity Fair and was inspired to copy many character and plot elements from his book written a century before. Am I good or what?

I wonder if Edith Wharton also read Thackeray before she wrote House of Mirth?