He stole her ideas and put them in his books. Ever since the publication of Zelda, it has been widely taken for granted that its subject was a victim avant la lettre of the nefarious doings of what is now known as the “patriarchy.” This point of view was crudely summed up in a 2016 Hollywood Reporter interview with Mark Gill, the president of Millennium Films, which is developing a biopic in which Jennifer Lawrence will play Zelda: “She was massively ahead of her time, and she took a beating for it. Fitzgerald-I believe that is how he spells his name-seems to believe that plagiarism begins at home.”īut what was regarded in the ’20s and ’30s as novelistic business as usual would come to be viewed in a more lurid light by later feminist commentators. As early as 1922, the New York Tribune published Zelda’s quasi-review of Scott’s second novel, The Beautiful and Damned, in whose pages she correctly and wittily claimed to have found fragments of her own unpublished writings: “Mr. The fact that he had quarried Zelda’s life and work (such as the latter was) for inspiration was no secret. And while Milford was inclined to romanticize her subject, she was still judicious in appraising Zelda’s slender body of work, not exaggerating its literary merits but arguing that it was of continuing value as a document of a strongly individual personality who was interesting not merely as the wife of a major American author but in her own right.īut Milford also reminded a new generation of readers of something long known to Fitzgerald scholars, which is that Scott had made use of Zelda’s diary and correspondence in writing several of his own works-most notably Tender Is the Night (1934), his fourth novel, a semi-autobiographical roman à clef whose central characters, Dick and Nicole Diver, are based in large part on the Fitzgeralds themselves. It was not until the publication in 1970 of Nancy Milford’s Zelda: A Biography that people began to write about Zelda Fitzgerald as something other than Scott’s glamorous but mad spouse. In those days, she was still seen as a clever, beautiful pendant to her husband, who by then had written three novels, one of them a masterpiece, and dozens of short stories, not a few of the latter of the highest possible quality. Fitzgerald is a novelty.” But he penned those words before Zelda had written anything other than a handful of short stories and prose sketches. Ring Lardner, who knew both Fitzgeralds well, summed up the case for the prosecution when he wrote in 1925 that “Mr. No one seems to have thought any such thing in Zelda’s lifetime, and for long afterward. ![]() Most of them, Z included, proceed from the premise that Zelda, who spent the second half of her life shuttling in and out of mental institutions, was a major artist in the making whose gifts were crushed by an uncaring husband who refused to admit that she was his creative peer. It was based on Z, Therese Anne Fowler’s best-selling 2013 novel about the Fitzgeralds, the latest of a long string of fictionalized portrayals of the best-remembered married couple of the Roaring Twenties. Scott Fitzgerald, began airing earlier this year. Z: The Beginning of Everything, a soap-opera-ish 10-installment Amazon TV series in which Christina Ricci plays the ill-fated wife of F. Ixty-nine years after her death and 85 years after the publication of her only completed novel, Save Me the Waltz, Zelda Fitzgerald is still making news.
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