Reading: Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin

Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin: Writers Running Wild in the Twenties by Marion Meade looks at the years from 1920 to 1930 through the lives of four professional female writers: Zelda Fitzgerald, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Dorothy Parker and Edna Ferber.

I didn't know Zelda Fitzgerald was a professional in her own time but it seems she wrote both articles and short stories that were published under her name together with Scott's and earned a reasonable chunk of change thereby. Scott himself would alternately bristle and scoff when Zelda described herself as a writer; I guess her stuff was good enough for him to put his name on but not good enough for her to derive an identity from it. Or something. Truth be told, I can't read about Zelda Fitzgerald without intense frustration, because she's so hyperfeminine that she gets my back up but her husband was such a piece of work that I can't help being on her side when sides are being picked.

Edna Ferber was the only one of the four about whom I'd never read and I left wanting more because she seems to have been the only one who "survived," in a way. She died in 1968 at the age of 82 in her own home and unmarried. The Amazon review says she suffers in comparison with her more colorful colleagues but compared to the needy, suicidal Parker and the perpetually adolescent Millay, not to mention Zelda Fitzgerald who died at 47 in a mental home -- well, the best stories don't always make the happiest lives, evidently. There's a moral in there somewhere.