Zelda Fitzgerald: The Tragic, Meticulously Researched Biography of the Jazz Age's High Priestess
By Sally Cline
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About this ebook
Zelda Fitzgerald was seen as the mythical American Dream Girl of the Roaring Twenties. Her romance with F. Scott Fitzgerald became a symbol of Jazz Age glamour and spectacle. But not long after the stock market crash of 1929, Zelda descended into a nightmare of breakdowns and mental illness. Through Zelda’s autobiographical writings, including hundreds of letters she wrote to friends, family, publishers, and many others, “Sally Cline succeeds in breathing fresh life into this jazz-age icon” (The Washington Post Book World).
Accessing new medical evidence and interviews with Zelda’s last psychiatrist, Cline suggest that the writer’s “insanity” may have been the product of the treatment she endured for schizophrenia, rather than a clinical condition. In narrating Zelda’s life, Cline evokes the circle of Jazz Age friends that included Edmund Wilson, Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, Dorothy Parker, Lillian Hellman, and H.L. Mencken. Zelda Fitzgerald is a “powerful, tragic, and engrossing biography” (Minneapolis Star-Tribune) about “one of the twentieth century’s most fascinating women” (Atlanta Journal-Constitution).
Sally Cline
Sally Cline was an award-winning biographer and fiction writer, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, Research Fellow at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, and former Advisory Fellow of the Royal Literary Fund as well as a Hawthornden Fellow. After Agatha: The Explosion in Women's Crime Writing was her fourteenth book. She wrote ten non-fiction titles, one biographical novel Lily and Max (Golden Books) and one book of short stories, One of Us is Lying (Golden Books). Her biography Radclyffe Hall: A Woman Called John (John Murray, UK) is now a classic, and was shortlisted for the LAMBDA Prize. Her study Lifting the Taboo: Women, Death and Dying (Little, Brown, UK) won the Arts Council Prize for Non-Fiction. Her ground-breaking biography Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise (John Murray, UK) and Zelda Fitzgerald: The Tragic Meticulously Researched Biography of the Jazz Age's High Priestess (Arcade, NY, US) was a bestseller in both the UK and the US and preceded her landmark biography Dashiell Hammett: Man of Mystery (Arcade NY, US) She was the co-series Editor for Bloomsbury's nine-volume Writers' and Artists' Companions in Writing, for which she co-authored two titles: Literary Non-Fiction (with Midge Gillies) and Life Writing: Writing Biography, Autobiography and Memoir (with Carole Angier). She was 2013 Judge for the HW Fisher Prize for First Published Biographies, a Consulting Editor for the International Literary Quarterly and wrote and recorded podcasts for the Royal Literary Fund. Her short stories for print and radio have won prizes from the BBC and Raconteur. She also won a Hosking Houses Trust Fellowship for Women Writers over forty. Formerly Director of the Royal Literary Fund Mentoring Scheme, mentor for the Arts Council Escalator programme, judge and mentor for the prestigious Gold Dust Mentoring Scheme, she taught social science and politics at Cambridge University. She was on City University London's Creative Writing Programme, was Writer in Residence and mentor for the MA in Creative Writing at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge and ran Creative Writing Workshops for the Guardian Masterclasses at Stratford on Avon. She held degrees and masters from Durham University (English and Philosophy) and Lancaster University (Sociology and Politics) and was awarded an Honorary Doctor of Letters in International Writing. She lived in Cornwall and Cambridge but sadly passed away in 2022.
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Zelda Fitzgerald: The Tragic, Meticulously Researched Biography of the Jazz Age's High Priestess Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Dashiell Hammett: Man of Mystery Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5After Agatha: Women Write Crime Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
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Reviews for Zelda Fitzgerald
11 ratings1 review
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Zelda Fitzgerald fascinates me. She is known as a beautiful, talented woman who became an icon of an age, the original 'American flapper', but she was also a troubled, frustrated and deeply unhappy woman. All I could think while reading Sally Cline's intelligent and well researched biography was, 'What if?' Did her marriage to Scott Fitzgerald make Zelda or destroy her? Could she ever have been happy as an independent artist, or did her marriage feed her writing, painting and dancing?Cline had access to perhaps the most sources, public and private, on Scott and Zelda, so this is a full and fact-based perspective of their life, compared to Milford's pioneering study or Linda Wagner-Martin's rather bitter feminist diatribe. Cline doesn't have to drag Scott down for stifling his wife's many talents or stealing her unique thoughts for his own writing - she lets him do that for himself. After reading the 'discussion' between Zelda, Scott and an 'impartial' referee in 1933, the dialogue recorded by a stenographer, I was tempted to destroy my copy of 'Tender is the Night'. Scott always stole his wife's words for his stories, lifting sections from her diaries and jotting down her witty sayings, but to actually claim that Zelda's experiences in various asylums belonged solely to him as 'material', and that she wasn't allowed to write her own book because it would upstage his work in progress, was taking an incredible liberty. The worst part is that Zelda was originally supportive of Scott's writing - she let him use her words, and put his name to her magazine articles and short stories, because she loved him and put him first. Then, after she was hospitalised and wanted to write for herself, Scott turned on her. He actually called her a 'third rate writer and a third rate ballet dancer', yet couldn't answer why he was then so bothered about Zelda writing for herself. Much of the psychiatric background in 'Tender' is lifted directly from Zelda's own history, and the two central characters are based on friends of theirs. Scott Fitzgerald was a good writer, but he could only write what - and who - he knew, again and again, mostly inspired by his wife and their mutual experiences. Zelda, on the other hand, was an original and lyrical wordsmith, and her fantastic metaphors and sharp wit are uniquely hers.Anger at Scott Fitzgerald aside, I thoroughly enjoyed this biography, especially after reading Zelda's only completed novel, 'Save Me the Waltz'. I would have liked to see some examples of the art that Cline describes, but I suppose that's a separate book!