Zelda Fitzgerald

Thank you, my friend SGT (Join to see) for making us aware that on March 10, 1948, American author, artist and socialite Zelda Fitzgerald, wife of writer F. Scott Fitzgerald, died at the age of 47.

Zelda Fitzgerald
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OK8bnwAy15w

Images:
1. Zelda Fitzgerald Ballet Years
2. Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald
3. April 3, 1920 - Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald Get Married
4. Zelda Fitzgerald was the epitome of 1920s style. Here she is holding her infant daughter Frances 'Scottie' Fitzgerald

Biographies
1. fscottfitzgeraldsociety.org/about-us-2/biography-zelda-fitzgerald/
2. ewyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/zelda-fitzgeralds-ballet-years

1. Background from [https://fscottfitzgeraldsociety.org/about-us-2/biography-zelda-fitzgerald/]
"Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald (1900-1948) was an artist, writer, and personality who helped to establish the Roaring Twenties image of liberated womanhood embodied by the “flapper.” She and her husband, novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940), became icons of the freedoms and excesses of the 1920s Jazz Age and symbols of the emerging cultural fascination with youth, conspicuous consumption, and leisure. Best known for her extravagant public persona and descent into mental illness, she is also remembered as an artist and author in her own right, and both her vivacity and tragedy live on in the many characters she inspired in her husband’s novels and short stories.
Born on July 24, 1900, in Montgomery, Zelda Sayre was the youngest child of Alabama Supreme Court Justice Anthony Dickson Sayre and Minnie Buckner Machen Sayre, a prominent middle-class couple with roots in both Montgomery and Confederate history. (Judge Sayre’s uncle William was a prominent Montgomery merchant whose home eventually became Jefferson Davis’s first White House; Minnie Sayre’s father was a Kentucky senator in the Confederate Congress). By her early adolescence, Zelda—named after the gypsy heroine of an obscure 1874 novel—was already a formidable presence in Montgomery social circles, starring in ballet recitals and basking in the glow of elite country club dances. At such a dance in July 1918, barely a month after graduating from Sidney Lanier High School, Zelda met F. Scott Fitzgerald, a 21-year-old army second lieutenant stationed at nearby Camp Sheridan. Despite Scott’s claim that he was on the verge of literary fame, Zelda doubted his financial prospects and entertained several other suitors, much to the chagrin of the aspiring author, who continued to press for an engagement. Zelda’s tactics fueled Scott’s insecurities, and the motif of a young man pursuing an elusive and conniving woman would later come to define his fiction.
In early 1920 prominent New York publisher Charles Scribner’s Sons accepted Scott’s first novel, This Side of Paradise, and Zelda finally accepted his proposal of marriage. The couple wed in New York on April 3, 1920, just as the book began to ignite a scandal for its portrayal of the free-wheeling lifestyle and relaxed morals of what became known as the “Lost Generation.” As the presumed inspiration for character Rosalind Connage, Zelda became an instant celebrity; and for the first half of the 1920s, she frequently contributed her opinions on modern love, marriage, and childrearing to an eager media. In 1921, Zelda gave birth to the couple’s only child, Frances “Scottie” Fitzgerald. Her reaction to the birth is purported to have been used by Scott in The Great Gatsby, in which Daisy Buchanan states in response to the birth of her daughter: “I’m glad it’s a girl. And I hope she’ll be a fool—that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.”
Zelda’s influence on Scott’s fiction in this period is inestimable. In addition to inspiring his major heroines, she supplied him with many other memorable lines, including an evocative description of Montgomery’s Oakwood Cemetery that appears in his short story “The Ice Palace.” When Scott’s novel The Beautiful and Damned was published, the New York Tribune hired Zelda to review it, she hinted that a passage in the book was lifted straight from her missing diary. Such statements have fueled scholarly debate that Zelda was Scott’s de facto collaborator and that he appropriated her personal experiences in his work. Such charges were given additional weight by the frequent addition of his name to her bylines on nearly two dozen stories and articles she produced between 1922 and 1934. In fact, Scott’s agent or editors added his name in several instances without his knowledge because the joint byline increased the price that these works received from leading magazines. Claims that Zelda “co-authored” her husband’s writing certainly are exaggerated, but few would deny that her personality was (and remains) key to its appeal.
By the late 1920s, the Fitzgeralds’s highly publicized and often stormy relationship began to break down as Zelda sought outlets for her own creativity. In addition to writing, she returned to two childhood passions—art and dance. In 1930, stress resulting from her frustrated attempts to become a professional ballerina led to the first of what would be many psychological breakdowns. (Although Zelda was treated for schizophrenia, mental-health experts later would contest both the diagnosis and recovery regimen prescribed by her main physician, Dr. Oscar Forel). From June 1930 to September 1931, Zelda lived at Les Rives de Prangins Clinic in Nyon, Switzerland. After her release, the couple returned to Montgomery and rented a home in the city’s Old Cloverdale neighborhood (the home is now the Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald Museum).
Scott soon left for Hollywood, and in February 1932 Zelda entered Johns Hopkins University’s Phipps Clinic, where she completed her only novel, Save Me the Waltz, an autobiographical recounting of her unstable marriage. Scott deeply resented the book, blaming the financial burden of her hospitalization for his inability to complete Tender Is the Night, and he also accused Zelda of poaching its plot for her novel. When her novel failed to garner critical or commercial interest (royalties amounted to a paltry $120), Zelda abandoned her literary aspirations. She then tried writing for the stage and produced the unsuccessful comedy Scandalabra, mounted by an amateur drama troupe in Baltimore in 1933. It was her last public writing effort. Zelda next turned to painting, but she fared no better. A 1934 show of her work in New York inspired a condescending notice in Time magazine that described the event as her “latest bid for fame” and her canvases as “the work of a brilliant introvert.”
Morgan Le FayThe Fitzgeralds parted ways in 1934, although they never divorced. (Their daughter was largely raised by nannies before entering boarding school). From 1936 to 1940, Zelda resided at Highland Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina, and Scott descended into alcoholism and literary obscurity, eventually relocating to Hollywood in the hope of establishing himself as a screenwriter. He died of a heart attack there on December 21, 1940. That year, Zelda returned to Montgomery, where she lived under the care of her mother. In addition to painting, she took occasional dance lessons and began a second novel entitled Caesar’s Things, which remains unpublished. She returned occasionally to Highland Hospital when her depression became debilitating and was one of nine women killed on the night of March 10–11, 1948, when a fire swept through the hospital’s main wing.
Zelda’s final years coincided with her husband’s posthumous rediscovery as a significant American writer. Early F. Scott Fitzgerald biographers and critics tended to depict Zelda as equal parts liability and inspiration. Negative opinion culminated with the 1964 publication of Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, in which he portrays a fictionalized Zelda as a harridan who derailed her husband’s career. In Nancy Milford’s 1970 bestselling biography Zelda, she is a symbol of thwarted artistry, however—a theme echoed by many feminists, who see her frustrated attempts to establish herself as an artist as exemplifying the struggle women face in finding outlets and acceptance for their creativity. In recent years, scholars have both taught and written about Save Me the Waltz with increasing frequency, and exhibitions of Zelda’s surviving artwork regularly travel the United States. The Fitzgeralds’ story—of which Alabama is an indelible part—continues to fascinate scholars and the general public and has inspired an array of academic studies, movies, documentaries, and even musicals.
Additional Resources
Bruccoli, Matthew J., ed. The Collected Writings of Zelda Fitzgerald. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1991.
Cline, Sally. Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise. New York: Arcade Publishing, 2003.
Kurth, Peter, Jane S. Livingston, and Eleanor Lanahan, eds. Zelda: An Illustrated Life: The Private World of Zelda Fitzgerald. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1996.
Milford, Nancy. Zelda: A Biography. New York: Harper & Row, 1970.
Wagner-Martin, Linda. Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald: An American Woman’s Life. London: Palgrave, 2004."

2. Background from [https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/zelda-fitzgeralds-ballet-years]
"Zelda Fitzgerald’s Ballet Years
By Meryl Catesl
A frequently overlooked aspect of Zelda Fitzgerald’s life is her passion for ballet, which began when she was twenty-five.Photograph by CSU Archives / Everett
Afascination with Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s marriage ebbs and flows in our pop culture, and it is currently on the upswing, with shows such as “Z: The Beginning of Everything” and the new series “The Last Tycoon,” in which Zelda’s echo is faint and the viewer is left in the familiar position of wanting to know more about her life and her dynamism. A frequently overlooked aspect of Zelda is her passion for ballet. In the summer of 1925, ballet lessons at a studio in Paris became an outlet for her artistry, and swiftly led to an unsustainable fixation. Zelda was twenty-five, a mother and wife—she was five years into her marriage to Scott. Her commitment to dance quickly accelerated, and she decided to become a professional ballerina at the age of twenty-seven.
Having trained as a ballet dancer myself, I know that the physical demands of the art form are unforgiving. In a few years, Zelda had danced herself into an obsession, and mental illness erupted through the cracks of her physically exhausted body. In a recent conversation, Scott and Zelda’s granddaughter, Eleanor Lanahan, suggested that ballet seemed to give Zelda what she was seeking at the time—a mode of pure expression. It was a medium that wasn’t dominated by the great artists that were her social circle, where she might have felt easily overshadowed. “I’ll tell you about my mother,” Lanahan said of Zelda and Scott’s only child, Scottie Fitzgerald. “She felt her mother’s curse was that she had so much talent it was hard for her to focus on one.”
Dancing was an achievement that Zelda wanted completely for herself. In the July, 1929, issue of College Humor, the first of Zelda’s “Girls” stories was published, written with the intention of paying for her ballet lessons. “The Original Follies Girl” provides a satisfying glimpse into Zelda’s uncanny self-awareness. “She wore herself out with the struggle between her desire for physical perfection and her desire to use it,” Zelda wrote of her Girl. Later, she animated this mesmerizing period of her life in her only novel, “Save Me the Waltz,” published in 1932. It’s a deeply personal read, written while hospitalized in Phipps Clinic, in Baltimore, just after her second breakdown. We are shown the world of Zelda’s main character, Alabama, who begins taking ballet lessons and describes the pulling and twisting of her long legs at the barre.
Zelda’s infatuation with ballet can be traced to that summer, in 1925, when she began lessons in Paris with the great Russian ballerina Lubov Egorova. Afterward, travel kept the Fitzgeralds away from Paris until 1928. During that time, Zelda continued to train several days a week, in Philadelphia, while they rented a home in Delaware, but the discipline that drove her upon her return to France is remarkable. Egorova’s studio in Paris was a hive of the most talented dancers of the time. She had danced with the Imperial Russian Ballet and then with the Ballets Russes, under the famed Sergei Diaghilev. Each day, Zelda walked into a Degas scene: a studio filled with professional dancers who must have appeared to her as angels. One vision in particular was a ballerina called Lucienne. Scholars’ footnotes that accompany Zelda’s letters from 1930 identify Lucienne simply as “a ballerina at the studio.” It is more likely that this dancer is actually Lucienne Lamballe, of the Paris Opera Ballet. By 1924, Lamballe was a première danseuse, and she was a contemporary in age, only two years younger than Zelda. Lamballe took the professional class at the studio, and Egorova coached her privately for principal roles, common for prima ballerinas.
VIDEO FROM THE NEW YORKER

A Couple’s Last Words to Each Other

Zelda and Lucienne developed a friendship, and Lucienne appears several times in Scott’s ledger. In May, 1929, he simply recorded, “Lucien again,” as if she were a regular in the Fitzgeralds’ lives. After class, Zelda and Lucienne went to cafés and backstage at the Paris Opera theatre, but their relationship was susceptible to the strain and pressure of studio life. Zelda began to lose touch with her life at home, with her daughter, Scottie, and with Scott, who was drinking wildly as he struggled to focus on his next novel. Zelda’s dedication to her ballet technique became consuming.
It is not possible to verify how technically perfect Zelda’s dancing was. However, ballet cares little for personal feelings, and Egorova would not have continued to encourage Zelda’s intense training if her ability had no merit. Photographs from 1928 and 1929 show Zelda’s body changing. Noticeably thinner, her ankles were delicate and the arches of her feet high. Anne Margaret Daniel, the editor of “I’d Die for You: And Other Lost Stories,” a collection of previously unpublished or uncollected pieces by Fitzgerald, beautifully acknowledged this transformation as a manifestation of Zelda’s desire to literally, physically make something of herself. “I don’t think it had to be ballet, but ballet is what came to pass, and ballet is what she chose. It’s what she’s fixed upon. I think it’s indisputable that she was an accomplished dancer and that she was praised for her dancing as a young woman,” Daniel said. Perhaps, as an adult who was at a loss for inspiration, Zelda was looking to her youth.
There was a moment when Zelda’s efforts could have been entirely rewarded. Julia Sedova, a former dancer with the Imperial Russian Ballet and the ballet mistress of the San Carlo Opera dance company, wrote Zelda a letter, in French, dated September 23, 1929. In it, she offered Zelda the opportunity to perform in the Teatro di San Carlo’s production of the opera “Aida,” to dance “advantageous solos,” and, most incredibly, to dance for the full season with a monthly salary. Zelda did not go to Naples. (The letter is now stored at the Princeton University Library.)
Zelda’s decision not to go could perhaps be explained by her collapsing mental state at the time. She had begun to act desultory at home with Scott and friends. Her world was unravelling, and she exhibited mood swings that would have her enjoying parties at one moment and frantically fretting about leaving at the next. There were arguments with Lucienne, and Egorova began to see her as unhinged. In the spring of 1930, Zelda checked into Malmaison, a clinic near Paris, but she left shortly thereafter, for more dance lessons. Scott employed a “ballet psychoanalyst” (according to his ledger), to Zelda’s displeasure. Eventually, the strain became overwhelming, and she was admitted to Clinique Valmont, in Switzerland, and then to Prangins Clinic, near Geneva, on June 5, 1930. “I don’t want to call it a manifestation or a symptom,” Daniel commented of Zelda’s breakdown and its parallels to her ballet training. “I think that’s the wrong way of looking at it, I think it is a case of having to look at the mind and the body together.”
Throughout Zelda’s life, Scott supported her and desperately wanted to help her maintain good health. While Zelda was in treatment, Scott wrote to Egorova, asking her to evaluate Zelda’s dance abilities; Egorova replied that Zelda could go on to professional endeavors, but that, because of her late start, she could never be a first-rate ballerina. Scott understood this, and, in a particularly preachy letter to Zelda, in 1932, he attributed his own success, and Lucienne’s, to their “long desperate heart-destroying professional training beginning when we ie Lucienne + I were seven, probably.” Zelda did cultivate her other talents, especially her painting. She continually battled the “sense of inertia that hovers over my life” with a devout commitment to her own identity and creativity. But she never forgot her passion for ballet, and, in January, 1940, less than a year before Scott died, she wrote to him: “Scottie sent me a program of the Ballet Russe. This will never cease pulling at my heart-strings: not that I wish it would.”

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Good read!

Excellent history share.