Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise

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.