The Zelda 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 used in his own novels - often word for word 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 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, tragic life was lived at the height of that endless party Scott famously christened the Jazz Age. Her circle included Edmund Wilson, John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, Dorothy Parker and Lillian Hellman. Sally Cline brilliantly evokes that glittering group and also, perhaps more significantly, the Deep South from which Zelda longed to escape but from which she could never free herself.
Legend views Zelda Fitzgerald as a mythical, 1920s American Dream Girl, and the Southern Belle whose husband remained loyal despite her mental breakdowns. Sally Cline offers a more complex and controversial portrait, and an analysis of the marriage very different from what we have been told so far.
