Evening Class III

We learn that Harry Kane's business has failed and he comes close to bankruptcy, but Connie saves him by having invested money throughout her marriage which she now uses to bail him out. However Harry is not grateful and continues his affair with his secretary and to engage in dubious business practices. Connie gets on well with the people in her Italian class and is less lonely. Nora enjoys the work and she becomes friends with Aidan. However his wife is having an affair behind his back and is bored stiff with him. Another pupil at the class is Lou, a Dublin boy who works as a packer in an electrical goods shop. His parents own a small shop. He has gotten involved with a gang of criminals who use him to facilitate jobs, and he now regrets it although they have paid him generously. However, he meets a girl, Suzi, who is the daughter of Nora's landlords, and falls in love with her and he wants out of the criminal involvement. But his gang still want him to work for them, and suggest that he finds a place to stash things that they want kept for a few weeks. He's told to join the evening class so that he has an excuse for going into the school where security is fairly loose. He is not happy as he's not academic, but finds he enjoys the class. Laddy is another member of the class, he's a middle aged man who has learning difficulties, and he lives with his sister's son Gus and Gus's wife. They run a small hotel and at the hotel, Laddy met a rich Italian family and did them a favour, and they said he should come and visit them. Gus suggests that Laddy learn a bit of Italian, as he is trying to distract him from the idea of going to Italy.. since he does not think they really meant the invitation. Kathy Clark learns that Fran is not her sister but her mother. She became pregnant by a rich boy at the age of 16 and her family looked after her and she was treated as her grandparents' child. Fran is upset that she's found out the truth, but tells her that she will always be part of their family. Kathy finds that her father's family did not want him to marry Fran and they made a payment to the Clarks to keep it secret. Fran spent the money on bringing Kathy up.

Evening Class Part II

Aidan is delighted to find a teacher who will work for a small fee and who share his interest in Italy. They talk, and he feels a bit less depressed at not getting the headship and his wife's increasing coolness towards him. His elder daughter, Grainne, works in a bank and unknown to him, is seeing Tony OBrien, who has now become head of the school. She is angry when she finds that Tony got the job her father was hoping for but although he is several years older than her, she is attracted to him and goes on seeing him. The classes start and a surprising number of people turn up. One is Bill, a bank officer who knows Grainne. He is a nice shy lad who has a ditzy extravagant girlfriend. Another is a wealthy woman, Constance, who is married to a rich businessman. She and her husband have 4 children but their marriage is not very happy. Their sex life never worked out, and her husband soon turned to a mistress and ignores her. Connie's father was a gambler and he died in debt and her mother pushed her to find a well to do husband. She genuinely loved Harry but now after many years of an empty marriage she is depressed. Another pair who join the class are 2 sisters, Fran and Kathy Clark. Their father is a plumber and Kathy is still at school. Fran tries to encourage her sister to learn more and work towards getting a good job...

Evening Class by Maeve Binchy

Evening Class is a novel set in modern day Dublin, in Maeve's format of writing a chapter from each character's point of view. It starts with the return of Nora, a middle aged Irishwoman who has been living in Italy for many years. She went there because her Italian lover had told her that he could not marry her, that he was engaged to a girl in his home village and was expected to go back home to marry her. Nora followed him and managed to scrape a living teaching English and doing sewing. She waits for her lover to change his mind but instead sees him only occasionally for sex while he rears a family with his wife. Then after 20 years he is killed in a car crash and his wife tells Nora that she should leave the village. She has been shunned by her family in Ireland for having a long standing affair with a married man and does not know what will happen to her back in Dublin. She flies home and manages to find a room to live in a house in a working class estate near the Dublin mountains. She meets with her old friend Brenda, who runs a restaurant and Brenda tells her that she fears that Nora's family may welcome her back but it is because they want someone to look after her elderly mother. She advises her not to give way to their emotional blackmail. Meanwhile Aidan Quinn is a teacher at a school near to where Nora is living. He has 2 grown up daughters and a wife who seems indifferent to him. He had hopes of becoming headmaster of teh school, but is told by another teacher that its not going to happen, that he is not tough enough to manage a school in these hard times. Tony O'Brien, the other teacher, tells him that he himself is going to be headmaster and that AIdan should find another avenue to explore in teaching. He decides to set up Italian evening classes. Tony thinks that it will be hard to get funding for them but he wants to keep Aidan who is a good teacher, and he agrees to help. Nora finds out the rumours and goes to Aidan and offers herself as an evening class teacher who can teach Italian.

Gone with the Wind Part VIII

Scarlett makes a slow recovery from her miscarriage, and Rhett tries to persuade Melanie to get Ashley to buy out the mill, and run it, partly because he wants his wife to work less hard but also to sever the link between her and Ashley. Scarlett is watching Bonnie riding her pony, and as she watches Bonnie puts the pony at a higher fence and falls, breaking her neck. Rhett is devastated and Scarlett attacks him for encouraging the child to ride and jump fences and buying her a spirited pony. He begins to drink heavily. She feels guilty then and tries to persuade him to give their marriage another chance and have another child. He shrugs her off and goes on drinking. He is beginning to feel that he was wrong to turn against his southern heritage and he wants to reconnect with his roots again, to visit places where the Old South still exists. Scarlett goes to Tara for a holiday, to rest and then is summoned back to Atlanta, by a telegram to say that Melanie is very ill. SHe hurries back and Rhett takes her to Melanie's house, explaining that she had become pregnant and had been told when Beau was born that she should not have any more children.. and the pregnancy ended in miscarriage. Scarlett goes in to see Melanie who is very ill and she asks her to look after Beau and Ashley. She promises that she will do so, but realises that she does not really want Ashley any more and that he only wanted her on a physical level. When she gets home, she tries to tell Rhett that she now knows that he is the one she loves. He laughs at her, saying that she has found out how dull Ashley is and no longer wants him. She tries to explain and he laughs again and tells her that she is such a child, that she thinks she can just say sorry and be forgiven and make up for all the hurt she has caused. He tells her that he did really love her when they got married but he knew that if he revealed his love, she would bully him and so he concealed it. He says it is too late to make up for the fissures in their marriage, and that he'll give her a divorce. She says no, and he says that he will go travelling, trying to find the Old South and places where he can fit in, after his years of estrangement from his roots, but he'll come back often enough to avoid gossip about their marriage. He tells her that he has just stopped loving her and no longer cares what she does. He walks out and Scarlett collapses in tears. She then shakes herself up and tells herself that she can get him back, and that she will think of her problems tomorrow. Tomorrow is another day.

Gone with the Wind Part VII

Unfortunately, Scarlett pays a visit to Ashley at the mill, because Melanie has asked her to distract him while she prepares a surprise birthday party. He and Scarlett talk, and remember old times before the war when life was happy and luxurious, and he kisses her in a brotherly way. India Wilkes, Ashley's sister, who has always disliked Scarlett, and is rather sour spinster, finds them in an embrace and rushes to tell everyone in the town. Rhett is furious and he insists that Scarlett face her detractors at the birthday party. She is scared because she knows that most of the local elite do not like her because she has made more of a success of her businesses than they have, including the men, and she will be sneered at now for her apparent flirtation with Ashley. She has also had a reputation as a flirt which doesnt help. She begs Rhett to let her stay home but he fairly drags her to the party, wanting her to be humiliated. Scarlett finds that Melanie who has always been loyal to her, welcomes her and asks her to help receive the guests. She is wretched but faces it out, hating Melanie for her goodness. When she gets back home, Rhett is waiting and they have a violent row, which ends by his telling her that he's going to only have one person in his bed that night.. and he forces her upstairs and rapes her. THe book was written in the 1930s, so the idea of a woman enjoying rape was not unknown at the time, but it is distasteful to modern minds. Scarlett finds that she is overwhelmed by Rhett's sexual force, and is surprised when the next morning he tells her he is going away on a trip, and he takes Bonnie with him. Soon afterwards Scarlett finds that she is pregnant. She hopes that Rhett will return and that their marriage will work out, if they have another baby. She is realising that she and Ashley are not compatible and that her love for him was just an illusion. A couple of months later, Rhett returns with Bonnie who has missed her mother. He is not willing to show vulnerabilty to his wife, knowing that she will domineer over him if she realises that he cares for her. They soon have a row, and she is angry and resentful when she tells him she's pregnant.. He laughs at her and says that she might be lucky and have a miscarriage. Angrily, she lashes out at him and slips on the stairs. She does have a miscarriage and is very ill. She is delerious and calls for Rhett but he is drunk and weeping over the miscarriage...

Gone with the Wind Part VI

Rhett tells Scarlett that he has pursued her for years, and she has never given way to his seduction, so he is going to have to marry her. She is tempted as she does like him even though she continues to love Ashley. They get married and he encourages her to run her businesses. She has another baby, a daughter, called Victoria Eugenie, but the family call her Bonnie. Rhett adores his daughter and spoils her. But Scarlett tells him she does not want any more children. He is angry but he laughs it off and tells her that if she wont sleep with him, there are other women who will. He returns to Belle Watling and renews their affair. Rhett however begins to change after Bonnie's birth. He realises that because he and Scarlett are so unpopular among the Southern elite of Atlanta, it will affect her and also his step children. The upper class rarely invite the children to their parties and Rhett decides that he has to at least show willing to be a good Southerner and Democrat. He starts to ignore Scarlett's Yankee friends, and to court the friendship of the old Confederate families. He tells the ladies of the elite that he did fight for the South, in the latter years of the war, and that he is proud of his military service. The society ladies begin to warm to him, as he obviously loves Bonnie a lot and it seems he is not such a renegade as they believed. Scarlett is irritated by Rhett's sudden conversion to the Confederate cause, he tells her that her Yankee friends will end up kicked out of the South some day and that most of them are dishonest. She and Rhett are not so close by now. She lives in the moment and does not worry about whether Bonnie will be able to find a Southern gentleman husband when she is older. Rhett gets annoyed by her continuing infatuation for Ashley.

Gone with the Wind Part V

Rhett jeers at Ashley because he is jealous of Scarlett's affection for him. He points out to her that his family threw him out years ago because of his wild ways, and he managed to make his own way in the world and became a successful businessman and blockade runner. Scarlett gives Ashley a job, as manager of the sawmill and she continues to visit the business, driving herself alone. One day, she is attacked by some men who are living rough on a lonely part of the road. She manages to get away, but Frank feels obliged to defend his wife after she has almost been molested by black men, so he and some other men in the town set out to punish them. Scarlett does not know what is happening, because she rarely takes any interest in anything outside her own life, but the other women do. Rhett turns up and tells Melanie and Scarlett that the Yankee officers who are ruling the town are aware that Frank and his friends are making an attack on the men who tried to assault Scarlett and that they are very angry at the rebellious act.. He tells them that he found out because he is friendly with the Yanks and plays cards with them, and he advises that he must know where they have gone so that he can try and get them out before the soldiers find them. Melanie tells him, and Rhett manages to rescue most of the men, except for Frank, who was shot. He gets his prostitute mistress Belle Watling to swear that the men were in her whorehouse that night, and the Yanks find they have no case. They are maliciously amused to believe that a group of Southerners spend one night a week at the brothel. However, Scarlett finds, to her horror that she has been widowed again. She gets very upset, not because she cared much for Frank, but because she feels guilt that he has died and that she took him from Sue Ellen when she did not love him. Rhett visits her and laughs at her grieving, telling her that she is not sorry that she wasn't always kind to Frank but its just that she's afraid of divine punishment. He tells her that she did what she had to do to keep Tara, and she would do the same thing again. Gradually she recovers.. and goes back to running her businesses. The local Confederate families dont like her much because she seems so heartless and she has been a greater success at making money than they have been. She also does business with Yankee soldiers and carpet baggers, even though she hates them for the war... whereas most Southerners avoid them.