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Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald : an American woman's life

by Wagner-Martin, Linda.

Format: Print Book 2004
Availability: Available at 1 Library 1 of 1 copy

Available (1)
Location Collection Call #
CLP - Main Library Second Floor - Non-fiction PS3511.I9234 Z996 2004
Location  CLP - Main Library
 
Collection  Second Floor - Non-fiction
 
Call Number  PS3511.I9234 Z996 2004
 
 

Summary
Linda Wagner-Martin's Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald is a twenty-first century story. Using cultural and gender studies as contexts, Wagner-Martin brings new information to the story of the Alabama judge's daughter who, at seventeen, met her husband-to-be, Scott Fitzgerald. Swept away from her stable home life into Jazz Age New York and Paris, Zelda eventually learned to be a writer and a painter; and she came close to being a ballerina. An evocative portrayal of a talented woman's professional and emotional conflicts, this study contains extensive notes and new photographs.
Published Reviews
Booklist Review: "Wagner-Martin perceptively portrays Zelda not as an appendage to her famous husband, F. Scott Fitzgerald, but rather as a creative woman in her own right and as part of the heritage of southern women from which she sprang. Wagner-Martin, herself a southerner, hauntingly presents a fully three-dimensional biography of Zelda that goes beyond Nancy Milford's groundbreaking 1970 portrayal thanks to her access to newly available Princeton archives. Wagner-Martin begins with Zelda's birth, not the fateful day she met Minnesotan Fitzgerald in his impeccable lieutenant's uniform, and places her squarely in the milieu of Montgomery, Alabama. Here headstrong and flamboyant Zelda is no mere flapper, but rather a belle with the requisite family name and social class, a product of the turn-of-the-century Deep South, a southern lady caught up in Fitzgerald's obsessions and the impersonal urbanity of his northern and European jazzy and literary world, a relationship and a realm that undermined creativity but underestimated Zelda's confidence with disastrous results. --Whitney Scott Copyright 2004 Booklist"
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Publisher's Weekly Review: "Prolific literary biographer Wagner-Martin (Sylvia Plath, etc.) utilizes newly available files at Princeton for this fresh reassessment of F. Scott Fitzgerald's flamboyant, creative, troubled wife, stressing that Zelda's personality and character were shaped by her Southern upbringing and her relationship with her parents. Using documents pertaining to Zelda's psychiatric history and the works of contemporary psychologists to interpret the behavior that institutionalized Zelda (1900-1948) for the last half of her short life, Wagner-Martin concludes that it was Scott who drove Zelda into breakdown, with his compulsive drinking, cruel and abusive behavior, and scathing criticism of Zelda as a "third rate" writer and dancer. While Wagner-Martin sometimes uses such constructions as "it could be" to assess Zelda's state of mind and speculate about what was apparently the misdiagnosis of schizophrenia, she cogently argues that Zelda's breakdown was basically caused by her feelings of inferiority to Scott, her desire to alleviate their financial insolvency and, above all, the need to express herself creatively. Each attempt, she shows, was jealously blocked by Scott. Wagner-Martin's sturdy analysis does much to dispel the myth that the necessity of coping with Zelda's mental problems was Scott's tragic nemesis, effectively suggesting instead that "Zelda's crack-up gave him both alibi and cover" and that his alcoholism and "mean, inhuman" behavior toward Zelda were responsible for the destruction of two lives. 11 b&w illus. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved"
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Additional Information
Subjects Fitzgerald, Zelda, -- 1900-1948.
Fitzgerald, F. Scott -- (Francis Scott), -- 1896-1940 -- Marriage.
Psychiatric hospital patients -- United States -- Biography.
Mentally ill women -- United States -- Biography.
Authors, American -- 20th century -- Biography.
Authors' spouses -- United States -- Biography.
Painters -- United States -- Biography.
Women -- United States -- Biography.
Publisher Basingstoke, Hampshire ; New York :Palgrave Macmillan,2004
Language English
Description xv, 251 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm
Bibliography Notes Includes bibliographical references (pages 212-243) and index.
ISBN 1403934037
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