Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise

According to legend, Zelda Fitzgerald was the mythical American Dream Girl of the Roaring Twenties. She was the archetypal Southern belle who became the "first American flapper," in the words of her husband, the quintessential novelist of the period, F. Scott Fitzgerald. Their romance coincided with the glamour and spectacle of the Jazz Age, and legend has it that when Zelda cracked up, not long after the stock market crash of 1929, Scott remained loyal to her despite her frequent later breakdowns and final madness. Six years in the making, this powerful biography is the first on Zelda in more than thirty years. In it, Sally Cline presents a far more complex and controversial portrait, and an analysis of the Fitzgeralds' marriage very different from what we have been told so far. The Zelda Cline reveals was a serious artist: a painter of extraordinary and disturbing vision, a talented dancer, and a witty and dazzlingly original writer whose words and work Scott used in his own novels-often verbatim but never acknowledged. When she moved into what Scott felt was his literary territory, he tried to stifle her voice. Sally Cline brings us that authentic voice through Zelda's own highly autobiographical writings and through hundreds of letters she wrote to friends and family, publishers and others. 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 behavior toward her. Cline shows how Scott's alcoholism, too, was as destructive of Zelda and their marriage as it was of him. Cline's exhaustive research and incisive analysis animate a profoundly moving portrait of Zelda and provide a convincing context to her tragedy.