Review by Booklist Review
Once the hoydenish belle of Montgomery, Alabama, then the notorious flapper wife of the famed novelist who coined the very term jazz age, Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald was as artistic as she was bold and beautiful. Sadly, she lost her footing, suffering several breakdowns and enduring long periods of institutionalization. Nancy Milford was the first to tell Zelda's tragic story, and now, three decades later, newly released material enables British biographer Cline, whose previous subject was Radclyffe Hall, to present this remarkably fresh and comprehensive interpretation. The crux of her study is her energetic scrutiny of how Scott and Zelda's male doctors refused to recognize the legitimacy of Zelda's artistic drive, forbidding her to dance, paint, and write, pursuits essential to her well-being. It was the writing, of course, that enraged Scott the most, and Cline's tirelessly detailed and piercingly analytical parsing of his insistence that as a "professional" he had exclusive right to fictionalize Zelda's experiences is riveting in its revelations not only of his desperation but also of society's intrinsic misogyny. Cline not only clarifies many heretofore misunderstood aspects of Zelda's life, she also celebrates her unique style of whimsical and sardonic artistic expression. Donna Seaman
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
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. 35,000 first printing. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
This rather controversial biography reveals Zelda Fitzgerald's life as a complexity of "voices," from Southern belle who married F. Scott Fitzgerald and was taken to New York where suddenly she was living in the shadow of a famous and egotistical husband, to life in Paris, return to New York, and hospitalization for mental illness. Quoting directly from Zelda's autobiographical writings, scholar Cline (Couples: Scenes from the Inside) reveals that the Fitzgerald "romantic" marriage was actually troubled and Zelda's continued hospitalization medically unnecessary and fueled by Scott's fear that she would distract him from his writing. Zelda herself was a deeply creative person, talented as a painter, a dancer, and a writer but inhibited by her marriage and her own insecurities. More critical of the Fitzgerald marriage than Nancy Milford's Zelda: A Biography and more concerned with the stifling of a creative artist, this book is an excellent companion to Zelda: An Illustrated Life, edited by Eleanor Lanahan, which reproduces much of Zelda's art. Highly recommended for academic libraries and large public libraries.-Carolyn M. Craft, Longwood Univ., Farmville, VA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Wrapped up in a thorough biography, a strong case for why the unfortunate Zelda Fitzgerald should be remembered as an artist foremost, not merely as a victim of mental illness. Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald's life story is fairly well known, at least in broad outline, to students of American literature, if largely as a tale of star-crossed love. An Alabama debutante, she met Scott Fitzgerald at the end of WWI, was duly infatuated, married him--in a ceremony, notes British writer Cline (Women's Studies/Univ. of Cambridge; Couples, 1999, etc.), that her parents refused to attend--and went on to become a bon-vivant fixture of the Jazz Age, only to go mad and, eventually, to die in a fire in the asylum where she was confined. Cline revisits these events while threading in useful notes on Zelda Fitzgerald's artistic accomplishments (and not-so-useful remarks that smack of currently fashionable lit-crit, talking as they do of "invisibilized" art and whether Ernest Hemingway was gay). That Zelda's life was tragic almost goes without saying, but Cline carefully assembles evidence to show that she surely had more than her share of sorrows: at the end of her life, Zelda narrowed them down to a list of her four most traumatic experiences, of which the breakdown of her marriage to Scott (mostly owing to his alcoholism, but also to her advancing mental illness) was but one. Cline does an equally careful job of establishing and maintaining an argument that Zelda was an accomplished artist in several media, especially painting and dance. Though contemporaries such as Malcolm Cowley were less than wowed by her work (Cowley complained that Zelda's paintings were "flawed . . . by lack of proportion and craftsmanship"), Cline suggests that it was good enough on its own terms to fuel Scott Fitzgerald's abundant insecurities, one more cause for the disintegration of their marriage. Though less fluent than Nancy Milford's now-standard, 33-year-old Zelda, Cline's account should find considerable following among students of women's literature and art. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
