Scarlett, whatever its literary qualities, was a hard act to follow. CBS paid a then-record $8m for the rights to make a TV mini-series from the book, which starred the British actors Joanne Whalley-Kilmer and Timothy Dalton as Scarlett and Rhett. The book topped the New York Times best- seller list and the renewed interest in Mitchell's novel put that on the same list 57 years after its first publication. I don't think they would have liked a sequel written by Margaret Mitchell herself.' 'I haven't read the reviews,' Ripley remarked at the time, 'but I understand that they are pretty awful. It didn't work - at least in the eyes of the critics who reviewed Scarlett on its publication in 1991. As preparation for the work ahead, she not only re-read the novel six times but also famously wrote out in longhand the first 300-odd pages to see if she could capture the essence of Margaret Mitchell.

Already a best- selling writer, the previous year she had struck a lucrative deal with the Margaret Mitchell estate to write the sequel to Gone With the Wind. Not that Ripley needed to worry about critics. Publishers Weekly referred to 'the sorely abused conventions of the historical romance genre'. New Orleans Legacy (1987) found her back on safer ground, although critics still complained. Inevitably she thought she could probably write a better book than the ones she was reading and hyping. She also wrote copy for catalogues and the 'blurb' to go on the back cover of books. Again she tried a range of jobs, before eventually she went back to New York to read manuscripts for a publisher. The Ripleys had been living in New York (and, for a time, Florence) but now Alexandra Ripley returned to Charleston. In 1958 she married Leonard Ripley, but they divorced in 1963. After university, she tried several jobs, including working in the advertising department of a magazine in New York and for an airline in Washington, DC. She was sent to Ashley Hall finishing school and then, on a scholarship, to Vassar college in New York State, where she studied Russian. (Charleston was Butler's home town.) Her father, an insurance salesman, wanted her to be a Southern belle. She first read Gone With the Wind when she was 12 and later claimed that she used to sell directions to Rhett Butler's grave to naïve tourists.

New orleans legacy alexandra ripley