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Zelda Fitzgerald

Zelda Fitzgerald

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Born in 1900 in Montgomery, Alabama, Zelda (nee Sayre) Fitzgerald, rose to fame as the wife of Literary legend Francis Scott Fitzgerald, with the two becoming emblematic of the roaring 'Jazz Age' - a phrase first coined by Scott himself. Like her husband, Zelda desired a successful literary career, attempting to write several novels throughout her life which unfortunately failed to gain commercial success. After a failed career in writing, and a failed attempt to become a ballet dancer at the age of 27, combined with her and Scott’s tumultuous marriage and their issue’s with alcoholism, Zelda slowly slipped into the grips of mental deterioration -  and at the age of 30 was admitted into her first of several Psychiatric hospitals where she would remain until her death in 1948.

We are first introduced to the character of Zelda Fitzgerald at the beginning of Chapter 18, when the Callaghan’s decide to drop on in their literary friends - coaxed by the reassuring words of Editor, Max Perkins. Morley notes that there is a strange ‘stubbornness’ about Zelda’s face, and is quick to realise that Zelda, like her husband, is a strongly opinionated person whose views shall not be easily muted. We gain an understanding of zelda as a highly eccentric and exuberant character, whose intelligence and confidence often leads to confrontational challenges with the foremost influential minds of the 1920’s. Hemingway himself telling Callaghan that zelda was in fact, crazy.

Contrastingly we see an alienated aspect to Zelda, whose ‘unique’ idiosyncrasies lead to her periods of isolation, often at the behest of Scott’s wishes when her social behavior would fail to meet accepted standards.
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What is interesting is the frequency with which Voyant tools reflect the incidence of ‘Zelda’ and ‘Crazy’ occurring together. From this we can deduce that aside from one large spike in the narrative where Zelda is obviously behaving accordingly; for the majority of the text, Zelda appears to have a high correlation with her somewhat unpredictable behaviour. This reading supports the general understanding of Zelda Fitzgerald as a historical figure and allows us to gain a wider perspective of her role within Callaghan’s memoirs.


Callaghan, Morely. 1963. That summer in Paris: Memories of tangled friendships with Ernest Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald. London MacGibbon & Keehttp://fitzgerald.narod.ru/bio/callaghan-thatsum.html

Curnutt, Kirk. Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, Troy University Montgomery, Alabama. 15/03/07 http://www.encyclopediaofalabama.org/face/Article.jsp?id=h-1120

Wikipedia: Various contributers.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zelda_Fitzgerald

www.Voyant-tools.org