A short life of the author
Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald (24 July 1900 – 10 March 1948) was an American novelist, painter, dancer, and cultural figure whose life and work have become inseparable from the mythology of the Jazz Age and from the troubled marriage that defined both her own career and that of her husband, F. Scott Fitzgerald. She published one novel — Save Me the Waltz (1932) — and a handful of stories and essays, most of which appeared under her husband’s name or as joint bylines. She was institutionalised for schizophrenia for much of the last eighteen years of her life and died in a fire at the Highland Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina, at forty-seven. Her rehabilitation as a writer — and the broader reassessment of her marriage as a story of a woman’s creative talent suppressed by a husband who used her life as raw material — has been one of the significant literary-biographical projects of the late twentieth century.
Life
Zelda Sayre was born in Montgomery, Alabama, the youngest daughter of Anthony Dickinson Sayre, a judge of the Alabama Supreme Court. She was, by all accounts, the most beautiful, the most reckless, and the most talented girl in Montgomery — a Southern belle who smoked, drank, swam in the public fountain, and behaved with a freedom that scandalised the conservative town. She met F. Scott Fitzgerald, then a young Army lieutenant, at a country club dance in 1918; they married in 1920, a week after the publication of This Side of Paradise made Scott famous.
The Fitzgeralds became the most celebrated couple of the Jazz Age — they drank, fought, spent money recklessly, and lived in a blaze of publicity that Scott both cultivated and resented. They moved between New York, Paris, and the Riviera, befriending Hemingway, the Murphys, and the entire expatriate literary community. Zelda danced, painted, and wrote — but Scott, who used her diaries, letters, and conversation as material for his fiction, resisted her independent creative ambitions.
In 1930, Zelda suffered a severe mental breakdown and was diagnosed with schizophrenia. She was hospitalised at the Phipps Clinic at Johns Hopkins and later at various Swiss and American institutions. She spent the rest of her life moving between hospitals and brief periods of freedom.
Save Me the Waltz (1932)
Zelda wrote Save Me the Waltz in six weeks while hospitalised at the Phipps Clinic. The novel is a thinly fictionalised account of her life — her Alabama girlhood, her marriage to a famous artist (named David Knight in the novel), her attempt to become a professional ballet dancer in Paris, and her breakdown. The writing is extravagant, overwritten in places, and shot through with imagery of startling originality. Scott Fitzgerald was furious when he learned she had written a novel that overlapped with the material he was using for Tender Is the Night — he demanded revisions, and the published version reflects his editorial pressure.
The novel was poorly received at publication — Scribner’s printed only 3,010 copies, and it was largely ignored. Critics dismissed it as the work of a famous wife rather than a real writer. But subsequent readers — particularly feminist critics from the 1970s onward — have found in it a voice of genuine literary power: a woman writing about her own experience with a fierce, desperate eloquence that is quite different from her husband’s elegant irony.
The Question of Authorship
One of the most troubling aspects of the Fitzgerald marriage is the question of Zelda’s contribution to Scott’s work. Scott freely acknowledged using Zelda’s diaries and letters as material. Some of Zelda’s stories and essays were published under Scott’s name because his name commanded higher fees. The exact extent of her contribution to his work remains debated, but it is clear that Zelda was not merely a muse — she was a writer whose creative output was systematically absorbed into her husband’s career.
Painting
Zelda was also a painter of considerable talent. Her paintings — expressionist, colourful, often depicting ballet dancers and fairy-tale scenes — have been exhibited and collected, and they represent another dimension of her creative life that was overshadowed by her husband’s fame and her own illness. Many of her paintings were destroyed in the Highland Hospital fire that killed her.
Critical Standing
Zelda Fitzgerald’s reputation has grown steadily since the 1970s, when Nancy Milford’s biography Zelda (1970) introduced her to a new generation of readers and began the reassessment of her marriage. Save Me the Waltz is now recognised as a significant work of modernist fiction — not the equal of Tender Is the Night, perhaps, but a book with its own voice and its own power.
Collecting Fitzgerald
Save Me the Waltz (1932, Scribner’s) in first edition with dust jacket is one of the great modernist rarities — only 3,010 copies were printed, and fine copies with jacket bring $10,000–$30,000. The Collected Writings (1991, Scribner’s, edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli) brings $30–$80. Zelda’s paintings, when they appear at auction, bring $5,000–$50,000.