EFR REVIEWS

THE BEGUILED Wounded and near death, a young Union Army corporal is found in the woods of Virginia during the height of the Civil War and brought to the nearby Miss Martha Farnsworth Seminary for Young Ladies. Almost immediately he sets about beguiling the three women and five teenage girls stranded in this outpost of Southern gentility, eliciting their love and fear, pity and infatuation, and pitting them against one another in a bid for his freedom. But as the women are revealed for what they really are, a sense of ominous foreboding closes in on the soldier, and the question becomes: Just who is the beguiled? ★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆ Union Army Corporal John Patrick McBurney, 20, is found wounded / near dead in the Virginia woods by thirteen year old Amelia Dabney while she's out mushroom hunting. Amelia decides to take John back to her nearby boarding school, the Martha Farnsworth Seminary for Young Ladies. Regarding the history of the school, the story goes that Farnsworth E...

To get the backstory on  Gone With The Wind , I read  Southern Daughter  by  Darden Asbury Pyron.  This bio is great for those academically interested in Mitchell and her writing process but as far  a s casual, leisure reading? Wooooo, is it dry! Still, I did get some interesting tidbits here and there.  "Georgia Peach" Margaret Mitchell came into the world on the day of her parents 8th wedding anniversary, November 8th, 1900. Mitchell was born into a family of book lovers, though some preferred to read only serious, non-fiction works. As a child, Margaret's mother was advised by Margaret's grandfather to focus on history and philosophy selections "to edify the mind" and "not waste your time in those little novels". Margaret pushed for more freedom in her reading choices while her mother tried to instill the same rigidity she was raised on, even trying to pay Margaret to read her classics: "Mother used to give me a nickel for eac...

Gone With The Wind. That is one beautifully shot movie.  I've seen it dozens of times. The movie actually made me really curious about the original book, and then while reading the book I was also reading a bio on Margaret Mitchell  --- between these two books and the movie, I came across so much good stuff I wanted to hash over! I'm sure, given the iconic rep this book has, that I'm probably going to upset the mass majority here, but truthfully now ... I wasn't overly blown away by this book. There. I said it, hate mail be damned. I did not fall madly in love with Mitchell's opus here. But hear me out -- that's not to say that I failed to find anything good in this massive book, there were elements I really liked. I just ended up feeling like the book could have used some serious editing {btw, after reading the Mitchell bio, I found out that the book DID go through massive edits but sorry, to me it felt like some parts in there could have sti...