Zelda Fitzgerald : Her Voice in Paradise - Hardcover

Sally Cline

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0719554667 ISBN 13: 9780719554667

Publisher: John Murray Publishers Ltd, 2002

Synopsis

Legend views Zelda Fitzgerald as the mythical American Dream Girl of the 1920s, later as the Southern Belle whose brilliant husband Scott remained loyal despite her frequent breakdowns and final madness. The Zelda that Sally Cline reveals was a serious artist: a painter of extraordinary and disturbing vision, a talented dancer and a witty and original writer whose work Scott often used in his own novels but never acknowledged. Hitherto untapped sources, including medical evidence and interviews with Zelda's last psychiatrist, suggest that her insanity may have been less a specific clinical condition than the product of her treatment for schizophrenia and her husband's behaviour towards her. Cline shows how Scott's alcoholism, too, was as destructive of Zelda and their marriage as it was of him. Zelda's vivid and tragic life was lived at the height of the Jazz Age. Her circle included Edmund Wilson, John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, Dorothy Parker and Lillian Hellman. Sally Cline evokes that gilttering group and also, perhaps more significantly, the Deep South from which Zelda longed to escape but from which she could never free herself.

About this title

About the Author:

Sally Cline is the author of the acclaimed biography 'Radclyffe Hall: A Woman Called John'. Both her short stories and her non-fiction have won literary prizes. She teaches part time at the University of Cambridge and holds a Royal Literary Fund Writer's Fellowship at Anglia Polytechnic University.

From Publishers Weekly:

More than half a century after her death in a sanatorium fire in North Carolina, Zelda Fitzgerald (1900-1948) remains a controversial figure. Was she the Golden Girl and Jazz Age icon, the mad Southern belle who drove her husband to drink and destroyed his genius, or the doomed victim of Fitzgerald's ego? She was some of these and none, according to Cline's exhaustively researched biography. Cline was permitted for the first time to draw upon Zelda's medical records to document the range of treatments her physicians subjected her to in an effort to conform her to appropriately feminine behavior. Previous biographers have come down heavily in favor of one or the other of the doomed Fitzgerald pair. Cline, a Cambridge scholar and biographer of Radclyffe Hall, appears to agree with the psychiatrist who viewed the relationship as a folie ... deux, in which Scott viewed Zelda's desperate attempts to find an identity through writing, dance and painting as frontal attacks on his masculinity and genius, and Zelda, for her part, clung to an exhausting emotional dependence on Scott, never quite breaking free. If there is a villain here, it is Ernest Hemingway, who first launched the notion of Zelda's madness and remained her implacable enemy. Cline claims that Zelda was more successful as a writer, dancer and painter than is commonly supposed, though her argument would have been strengthened had more of Zelda's paintings been reproduced. 16 pages of b&w photos.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: John Murray Publishers Ltd
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0719554667
• ISBN 13: 9780719554667
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1