Zelda Fitzgerald
July 24, 1900 — Montgomery, Alabama
Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald was an American novelist, painter, and dancer who became the defining symbol of the Jazz Age alongside her husband F. Scott Fitzgerald — only to have her own considerable talents dismissed or absorbed by his, before mental illness and institutional confinement consumed her final two decades.
The Belle of Montgomery
Born on July 24, 1900 in Montgomery, Alabama, Zelda Sayre was the youngest daughter of a justice of the Alabama Supreme Court. Vivacious, witty, and openly unconventional in a deeply traditional Southern city, she was the most sought-after debutante in Alabama by the time she was seventeen. At a country club dance in 1918, she met a young U.S. Army officer named F. Scott Fitzgerald, who was stationed at nearby Camp Sheridan. Their courtship was turbulent: Zelda initially broke off their engagement, doubting that Fitzgerald could support her in the manner she expected. When his novel This Side of Paradise was published in 1920 and became an immediate sensation, she agreed to marry him. They wed in April 1920, a week after the book's release, and moved to New York, then Paris, then the South of France, at the centre of the expatriate literary world of the 1920s.
A Creative Partnership and Its Costs
Zelda wrote, painted, and studied ballet with ferocious intensity, but these pursuits were consistently subordinated to her husband's career. Her diary entries, which she shared with Scott, appeared in modified form in his novels — most notably in The Beautiful and Damned (1922) and Tender is the Night (1934). When she wrote a novel of her own, Save Me the Waltz (1932), Scott was furious, accusing her of mining material from his own work-in-progress. He edited the manuscript before publication. The book received mixed reviews and quickly went out of print. Meanwhile, Zelda's obsessive pursuit of ballet — beginning formal training at twenty-seven, far beyond the age at which professional dancers normally start — was, many biographers have argued, both a genuine passion and a desperate search for an identity independent of her husband.
Did You Know?
When Zelda's novel Save Me the Waltz was published in 1932, her literary reputation was already being actively suppressed. F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote to his editor Maxwell Perkins insisting that Zelda's book should not overshadow or compete with his own planned novel about the same events. Decades later, feminist literary scholars would recover Zelda's work and argue that her letters and prose reveal a writer of genuine originality whose voice was systematically silenced by the men around her.
Illness and the Fire
In 1930, Zelda suffered the first of what would be multiple mental breakdowns; she was diagnosed with schizophrenia (though modern assessments suggest bipolar disorder is more likely) and spent most of the rest of her life in and out of psychiatric institutions in Europe and the United States. F. Scott Fitzgerald died of a heart attack in 1940, and Zelda remained in care at Highland Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina. On the night of March 10, 1948, a fire broke out in the hospital's kitchen, which spread rapidly through the building. Zelda and eight other patients, locked in rooms on the upper floors awaiting electroconvulsive therapy, could not escape. She was forty-seven years old. She is buried alongside her husband at St. Mary's Church in Rockville, Maryland. Their shared epitaph is the final line of The Great Gatsby: "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."