Posted on 04/01/2013 10:45:00 AM PDT by the scotsman
'She is remembered as a profligate shrew who drove her husband to drink before going insane, but according to a new book, that is not an accurate portrait of Zelda Fitzgerald.
In fact, it's a 'persistent, damning mischaracterisation that needs undoing' says author, Therese Anne Fowler, who argues that not only was the spoiled wife of Great Gatsby author, F. Scott Fitzgerald sane, she was also devoted to her husband.
Fowler, who began Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald wondering whether she really wanted to spend a year in the company of a 'hyperactive madwoman', says she soon discovered that almost everything she'd ever heard about the socialite was wrong.'
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
Interesting article. Fitzgerald sure could turn a phrase.
“Tchaikovsky. Was he the tortured soul who poured out his immortal longings into dignified passages of stately music, or was he just an old poof who wrote tunes?” ~ Monty Python
But there are no fjords in TX.
I used to drive by the old Sayre house when I visited our group headquarters in Montgomery. It was on Sayre Street, named for her Father, not Zelda.
I also read a book about Zelda maybe 20 years ago. I suspect she was probably insane toward the end but probably would have been OK if she had stayed in Montgomery, Alabama and married some local guy.
I do remember reading where when she met Hemmingway the first time, he quietly told Fitzgerald that Zelda was insane. Zelda told F. Scott that Hemmingway was a phony.
It's very possible she wasn't nuts...just desperately unhappy from not being truly loved.
This lack of love can manifest in many ways. Much of the time the symptoms are misdiagnosed by phsychiatrists community who have largely been trained in gender Freudian gender "equality"...thus not knowing anything about the true human psyche and how to treat it.
I guess feminists feel like it’s time to rehabilitate the image of this woman.
Of course, the movie which is sure to come out about her is more BS from the Liberal MSM.
When you live with an alcoholic you tend to get a little crazy. You don’t drive people to drink, they drink in spite of what you do and in the end it is all your fault.
Mental illness ran in her family. One of her siblings committed suicide, and one of her grandparents was insane.
She wasn’t Fitzgerald’s true love and I suspect she knew it. Ginevra King was. He almost backed out of marrying Zelda, but I suspect he gave in due to sheer passivity after losing Ginevra.
He and Zelda became what we call now “co-dependent”, especially once they became the Twenties’ glamor couple.
Or at least this my theory after reading tons of books about both of them.
I will defer to you as I haven’t done much research.
I think co-depenent probably describes them well.
I just hate when other people are blamed for an alcoholic’s problem. I’ve known too many of them.
I do remember reading where when she met Hemingway the first time, he quietly told Fitzgerald that Zelda was insane. Zelda told F. Scott that Hemingway was a phony.
That’s just what I thought when I read that.
Hemingway measured F’s penis in ‘A Moveable Feast.’ Zelda said it was under-sized.
Ernie assured him that it looks small when it is looked down upon.
Nothing to see here. Let’s move along ...
“The parrot ain’t dead, he’s pining”
“The parrot ain’t dead, he’s pining”
Autobiography, love story, and literary history, this classic memoir is "the very best portrait of F. Scott Fitzgerald that has yet been put into print". So wrote critic Edmund Wilson about this international best seller in 1959. Sheilah Graham paints an intimate yet objective portrait of Fitzgerald -- turning out screenplays in late-1930s Hollywood to pay his debts, frequently drunk and increasingly despondent over his declining literary reputation. Strengthened and encouraged by Graham, Fitzgerald started his last and most ambitious novel, "The Last Tycoon". Graham served as his model for the character Kathleen. Bit in 1940 he died in her home before completing the book. In "Beloved Infidel", Graham also traces her own life, a tale part Cinderella, part Pygmalion that begins in her native England. Her early career on the stage and in journalism led her to Hollywood and a thirty-five-year career as a gossip columnist. Graham died in November 1988.
i am curious... have you read The Paris Wife?
It could just mean one was fragile, flighty, "irrational," or not in control of one's emotions. One could have "fits of madness" being to all appearances "normal" most of the time.
I don't think anybody said Zelda had to be chained-up or straight-jacketed, just that she had trouble coping in the outside world.
P.S. Love the caption:
Scandalous: The behaviour of young flappers such as these was viewed with horror by the older generation
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