Who is zelda sayre

The idea of Zelda as a brilliant woman trapped by her time has gained traction in recent years, with a number of works re-evaluating her through the prism of feminism — although it is not always the easiest of fits. He stole her ideas and put them in his books. The marriage was a codependency from hell with a jazz-age soundtrack. Fowler agrees that there is a growing tendency to apply our own concerns to Zelda. Her individual sentences are often lovely, and she can create a mood and has clever turns of phrase but her works tend to be sketches rather than full stories.

In the months following, they returned mostly to normal, but in September, Zelda survived an overdose of sleeping pills; whether the overdose was intentional or not, the couple never said.

Zelda was often ill around this time, and in late , Zelda was unable to continue her traveling lifestyle and instead began painting. Although Zelda and Hemingway loathed each other from the start, Hemingway did introduce the couple to the rest of the " Lost Generation " expat community, such as Gertrude Stein. Their relationship turned volatile and more dramatic than ever, and both accused the other of affairs.

Desperate for success of her own, Zelda took up the reins of her ballet studies again. She practiced intensely, sometimes for up to eight hours a day, and while she did have some talent, the physical demands and the lack of support from Scott proved too much for her.

Even when she was offered a spot with an opera ballet company in Italy, she had to decline. Zelda was admitted to a French sanatorium in and bounced between clinics for physical and psychological treatments for around a year.

When her father was dying in September , the Fitzgeralds returned to Alabama; after his death, Zelda went to a hospital in Baltimore and Scott went to Hollywood. The semi-autobiographical novel was her biggest work to date, but it infuriated Scott, who had planned to use some of the same material in his work. By the s, Zelda was spending most of her time in and out of mental institutions.

She continued to produce paintings, which were tepidly received. In , when Zelda seemingly disconnected from reality, Scott sent her to another hospital, this one in North Carolina.

He then proceeded to have an affair in Hollywood with columnist Sheilah Graham, bitter about how his marriage to Zelda had turned out. By , though, Zelda had made enough progress to be released. She and Scott never saw each other again, but they corresponded until his sudden death in December She was inspired and began working on another novel, but her mental health declined again and she returned to the North Carolina hospital. In , a fire broke out at the hospital, and Zelda, in a locked room awaiting an electroshock therapy session, did not escape.

She died at the age of 47 and was buried alongside Scott. In the end, Scott helped Zelda with revisions of her novel. He also arranged publication of various articles she wrote and helped produce her play, Scandalabra , written when she was an outpatient in Baltimore. When Zelda began painting seriously, he arranged an exhibition of her work at a New York gallery.

Nor do I believe in latter-day diagnoses, based only on letters and art. Perfect strangers have volunteered with straight faces that Zelda had all the talent and Scott simply stole her ideas—an injustice that, of course, drove her crazy! Zelda had many periods of lucidity and she was never declared legally insane. Her illness had many phases. When she was well, she wrote lyrical, haunting, loving, and nostalgic prose.

When she was ill, she sent terribly convoluted warnings to friends about the Second Coming. The strain on Scott was enormous. He tried to be both father and mother to his daughter, to provide the best possible treatment for his wife, and to keep the family financially afloat. But, as he admitted publicly in The Crack-Up , he now faced his own emotional bankruptcy. The wellspring of his story ideas had dried up. Until he was hired as a scriptwriter by MGM, he faced despair.

My mother felt he would have made a fine headmaster of a school. The summer before she entered Vassar College, he warned her:. You have reached the age when one is of interest to an adult only insofar as one seems to have a future. The mind of a little child is fascinating, for it looks on old things with new eyes—but at about twelve this changes.

The adolescent offers nothing, can do nothing, say nothing that the adult cannot do better. To sum up: What you have done to please me or make me proud is practically negligible since the time you made yourself a good diver at camp and now you are softer than you have ever been.

On the other hand, when occasionally I see signs of life and intention in you, there is no company in the world I would prefer. Scott wrote weekly to my mother at college. He told her which courses to take, what extracurricular activities were worthwhile, whom to date, her duties toward Zelda, what to read, and how to wear her hair.

He critiqued her behavior, her academic performance, and her choice of roommates. Clearly, he loved Scottie very much and his self-confessed desire to preach now had an outlet. From California, Scott also wrote to Zelda, loyally, warmly, and sometimes perfunctorily. During the last three years of his life, while working as a scriptwriter in Hollywood and, later, on his fifth novel, he began an affair with the gossip columnist Sheilah Graham.

I believe, as did my mother, that Scott and Zelda stayed in love until the day they died. Scott Fitzgerald Society is an international forum for the promotion, understanding and enjoyment of the works of F. Scott Fitzgerald. We're not around right now. But you can send us an email and we'll get back to you, asap.

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