All quotes on this page are from the book, "Gone With the Wind," by Margaret Mitchell. Some of them had to be modified due to inappropriate content and racism, so everything I changed has [ ] around it.

Ellen had been trained, like other girls, to be "above other things, sweet, gentle, beautiful and ornamental". She loved her cousin, wild Philippe Robillard. But, "with foreboding, Mammy had brought her young mistress a small package, addressed in a strange hand from New Orleans, a package containing a miniature of Ellen, wich she flung to the floor with a cry, four letters in her own handwriting to Philippe Robillard, and a brief letter from a New Orleans priest, announcing the death of her cousin in a barroom brawl".

Ellen blamed her father and her sisters, Eulalie and Pauline, for his death. She said that they drove him away. She hated them all after that, and vowed "I will go away where I'll never see them again, or this town, or anyone who reminds me of--of--him."

That is where Gerald O'Hara, who was a head shorter than her and old enough to be her father, came into her life. 'The slightly tilting dark eyes of Ellen Robillard had taken more than his eye. Despite a mystifying listlessness of manner, so strange in a girl of fifteen, she charmed him. Moreover, there was a haunting look of despair about her that went to his heart and made him more gentle with her than he had ever been with any person in all the world.'

Gerald asked the young girl to marry him and come to Tara, and Ellen, 'very white but very calm, put a light hand on his arm and said: "I will marry you, Mr. O'Hara." '

Mammy protested to her young mistress, "But, honey, you kain do dat!"

Ellen replied, "I will do it. He is a kind man. I will do it or go into the convent at Charleston."

The consent of heart stricken Pierre Robillard was won through this threat. So Ellen turned her back on Savannah, and never saw it again. She had a middle-aged husband, Mammy, and twenty house servants, and all of them went to Tara.

She had departed from her father's graceful, flowing house to this rambling place where Gerald had lived alone.

'Ellen had been given this preparation for marriage which any well-brought-up young lady received, and she also had Mammy, who could galvanize the most shiftless [servant] into energy. She quickly brought order, dignity and grace into Gerald's household, and she gave Tara a beauty it never had before.'

'Ellen's life was not easy, nor was it happy, but she did not expect life to be easy, and, if it was not happy, that was a woman's lot. It was a man's world, and she accepted it as such. The man owned the property, and the woman managed it. The man took the credit for the management, and the woman praised his cleverness. The man roared like a bull when a splinter was in his finger, and the woman muffled the moans of childbirth, lest she disturb him. Men were rough of speck and often drunk. Women ignored the lapses of speech and put the drunkards to bed without bitter words. Men were rude and outspoken, women were always kind, gracious and forgiving.'

'The next year, their first child was born and they named her Katie Scarlett, after Gerald's mother. Gerald was disappointed, for he had wanted a son, but her nevertheless was pleased enough over his small black-haired daughter to serve rum to every [servant] in Tara and to get roaringly, happily drunk himself.'

In due time Susan Elinor (Suellen) and Caroline Irene (Carreen) were born. Ellen gave love to everyone around her, and was worshiped by Scarlett, who often got her mother and the Virgin Mary confused.

Ellen died of typhoid after nursing Emmie Slattery, one day before Scarlett returned home from Atlanta. Her death broke Gerald's heart, and to his death, he lived in his own world, one where Ellen was still with him. I'd like to think that Ellen found happiness at long last, with her love, Phillippe Robillard. She died calling to him.