Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald: An American Woman's Life (Hardcover)

~ (Author) "There are few more memorable wives in twentieth century American culture than Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, who was married to the successful young author F. Scott..." (more)
Key Phrases: New York, Zelda Sayre, Scott Fitzgerald (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

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.
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From Booklist

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 © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 224 pages
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan (October 14, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1403934037
• ISBN-13: 978-1403934031
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.5 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,124,117 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A life in the margins, June 9, 2005

By	Melanie Gilbert (Boston, MA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Zelda Fitzgerald will always be known as the `wife of' F. Scott Fitzgerald and not, as her husband was, a writer, despite the best attempts of any biographer.

I found author Linda Wagner-Martin's biography less an indictment of F. Scott and more one of a Southern belle system that trivialized, sexualized and indoctrinated women in a life that emphasized their desirability and motherhood at the expense of any other gifts or talents. Wagner-Martin has the right argument but reaches the wrong conclusions and so I rated this interesting work three stars.

Wagner-Martin shows how Zelda willingly played into these roles in her young life, seeing it was a way out of her parents' house (although she returns there time and again), only to later realize that they had firmly entrapped her as a married adult. Neither she nor Scott could break that dynamic largely at her expense. Even their daughter Scottie described her mother as a willing victim, a perspective that was conveniently left out of this work.

At the same time Zelda was obsessing over her marginal status to the brink of mental instability, women like Zora Neale Hurston and Agatha Christie were overcoming fierce financial odds and social/sexist obstacles to accomplish their artistic visions.

At the end of the day all that really matters is the work one leaves behind. That `body' of work can take on greater meaning and relevance than what remains of its creator. Frankly, focusing on Zelda's personality only serves to further marginalize her and what little work she did produce.

7 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Brings tears to my eyes., May 16, 2005

By	zeldazonk "zeldaz" (new york city) - See all my reviews

I was very surprised to see just one review on Amazon of this wonderful biography. This is the first review I have written here. I always check out what readers have to say about books I have read or intend to read. So I was really looking forward to a lot of stimulating feedback. That being said, I guess I will put in my two cents. This truly is the story of an American woman. And that is why I think it is so relevant to every woman living in American society today. Wagner-Martin does an exemplary job of illustrating how the genius and talent of woman can become neutralized through the weight and burden of early conditioning. Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald was a creature screaming and yearning to differentiate herself from the overpowering presence of her talented and lauded husband. The awful tragedy is that this intense passion to become her own person was so grossly misconstrued as mental illness. It is tough reading. My heart so went out to Zelda. Yet I can't help but recognize that woman today still has an uphill battle in a society that has yet to relinquish it's paternalistic tendencies and endemic misogny. I can't recommend enough this amazing study of a woman so ahead of her time, yet so crushed under the force of circumstance. The one hopeful note I can offer is that from it women readers can feel galvanized to act as individuals independent of convention and impulse and need and rise beyond the circumscribed roles imposed upon us. If only Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, as well as that tragic icon, Marilyn Monroe, could have lived long enough to see how far we have come in the battle for the rights of woman. But we have these beautiful women to look back upon to recognize the distance travelled. I guess that is something to be thankful for.

4 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars ZSF: An American Woman's Life, September 7, 2005

By	Cathy L. Welch "songful light" (Austin, TX USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

An antecedent to the 1970's "Zelda" by Milford, ZSF:An American Woman's Life, shows Zelda against the backdrop of a feminism which exploded during and after World War I. Zelda is characterized as more than a Southern belle, as if this were the whole and sum of the parts of her; she is depicted as a woman who wanted to marry "and have all the nice old safe things" yet she wanted a place in the world where she could write, act, paint and dance, areas in which she excelled, without the interference of her husband, F. Scott Fitzgerald.
It's a good read and a decades-later follow up to Milford's biography of Zelda.