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ACME Newspapers<\/a><\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
Marsha Gordon<\/a>, North Carolina State University<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n In 1925, F. Scott Fitzgerald published \u201cThe Great Gatsby<\/a>.\u201d Four years later, Ursula Parrott published her first novel, \u201cEx-Wife<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n I probably read \u201cThe Great Gatsby\u201d a dozen times between junior high school and my late 20s. But I had never even heard of Ursula Parrott or her 1929 bestseller until I stumbled across a screenplay adaption of one of Parrott\u2019s short stories.<\/p>\n Fitzgerald, in fact, had been hired to write that screenplay. Even though \u201cInfidelity\u201d was never produced because it was deemed too risqu\u00e9 by Hollywood\u2019s Production Code Administration<\/a>, its very existence piqued my curiosity.<\/p>\n Why was the most famous author of the Jazz Age hired to adapt a story by a totally unknown writer? And who on earth was Ursula Parrott?<\/p>\n I acquired a used copy of \u201cEx-Wife\u201d on eBay and soon realized that Ursula Parrott was not unknown; she was just forgotten.<\/p>\n In April 2023, I published a biography<\/a> of Parrott. Since then, I\u2019ve continued to try to understand just how and why she and her writing drifted into obscurity \u2013 how \u201cThe Great Gatsby\u201d is required reading but few have heard of \u201cEx-Wife\u201d or its author.<\/p>\n Both \u201cEx-Wife\u201d and \u201cThe Great Gatsby\u201d are modern novels of love and loss, money and (mostly bad) manners. They\u2019re set in New York and saturated with the energy, language and spirit of the time. Both garnered mixed reviews<\/a>, deemed by many critics as entertaining and of the moment but not great literature<\/a>.<\/p>\n At first, \u201cEx-Wife\u201d was far more successful than \u201cGatsby,\u201d blasting through a dozen printings and selling over 100,000 copies. It was translated into multiple languages and reprinted in paperback editions through the late 1940s.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, \u201cThe Great Gatsby\u201d went through a mere two printings totaling less than 24,000 copies<\/a>, not all of which sold. By the time Fitzgerald died in 1940, the novel had essentially been forgotten.<\/p>\n \u201cEx-Wife\u201d centers on a 24-year-old woman named Patricia whose husband is divorcing her. Supporting herself with a job in department store advertising, she learns to navigate life in Manhattan as a divorc\u00e9e.<\/p>\n Whereas \u201cThe Great Gatsby\u201d is largely a suburban novel with trips into the city, \u201cEx-Wife\u201d is fully immersed in Manhattan, especially Greenwich Village, where Parrott herself lived after she married her first husband. The novel\u2019s characters drink Clover Clubs, Alexanders, brandy flips and Manhattans while frequenting the Brevoort, the Waldorf, Delano\u2019s and Dante\u2019s.<\/p>\n \u201cEx-Wife\u201d revels in the rhythms of the city: One chapter even includes musical bars from George Gershwin\u2019s hit \u201cRhapsody in Blue<\/a>\u201d sprinkled between paragraphs.<\/p>\n But \u201cEx-Wife\u201d is not all martinis and music. Parrott uses it to address, in unsparing directness, the challenges that women faced and the limited paths available to them. This alone sets it apart from the male protagonists of \u201cThe Great Gatsby\u201d and the novel\u2019s scant attention to the experiences of its female characters.<\/p>\n Parrott\u2019s witty and biting novel was, in fact, concerned first and foremost with a generation of young women who had abandoned Victorian sensibilities: They got educations and jobs, drank, had premarital and extramarital sex, and cast aside pretensions of being the fairer, gentler sex.<\/p>\n But in shedding these mores, they also sacrificed protections. Patricia reflects on how men of their generation used women\u2019s self-sufficiency and independence as an excuse to leave them to fend for themselves: \u201cFreedom for women turned out to be God\u2019s greatest gift to men.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cEx-Wife\u201d depicts a culture in which women often suffer at the hands of men. At one point, Patricia is brutally raped. In another scene, her husband throws her through a glass win dow during a fight, a moment as harrowing for its rendering of domestic violence as it is for Pat\u2019s nonchalant reaction to it. In one of the book\u2019s most moving episodes, Pat is compelled to procure a risky abortion at her soon-to-be ex-husband\u2019s insistence but at her financial, physical and psychological cost.<\/p>\n \u201cOne survives almost everything,\u201d Patricia unhappily realizes.<\/p>\n She survives, however, thanks only to a streetwise female friend and mentor, her own ability to earn a living, practiced if not heartfelt flippancy, the numbing effects of alcohol and an acceptance that everything in her life is both transient and precarious.<\/p>\n Ursula Parrott had a keen understanding<\/a> of gender inequality and male privilege: Her own publisher made passes at her, her banker once proposed sexual favors in lieu of interest payments, and she experienced a rape not unlike the one she depicted in \u201cEx-Wife.\u201d<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Before she became a novelist, Parrott, who earned a degree in English from Radcliffe, had desperately wanted a career in journalism. However, she was barred from employment at all New York newspapers because her ex-husband, reporter Lindesay Parrott<\/a>, marked his professional territory by warning the city\u2019s editors \u2013 all male, of course \u2013 not to hire her.<\/p>\n There is a similar form of male chauvinism at work in the way that Parrott\u2019s writing was often treated by critics during her lifetime. Many described her books and short stories as romantic or melodramatic, fit only for consumption by women.<\/p>\n \u201cMelodramatic,\u201d Parrott once smartly observed in a letter<\/a>, is \u201cjust a word men use to describe any agony that might otherwise make them feel uncomfortable.\u201d<\/p>\n I am convinced that \u201cEx-Wife\u201d deserves a place alongside Fitzgerald\u2019s novel<\/a> in classrooms and in the hands of a new generation of readers based on the merits of its style and contents.<\/p>\n But more importantly, I\u2019m convinced that the reason Fitzgerald\u2019s novel is so ingrained in American life and letters has little to do with its originality, craft or quality and everything to do with the way books were marketed and promoted<\/a> over the arc of the 20th century.<\/p>\n \u201cThe Great Gatsby\u201d owes its resuscitation from obscurity<\/a> in the 1940s to the efforts of prominent male critics and scholars \u2013 and even to the American military.<\/p>\n Fitzgerald had important friends and admirers, among them the esteemed literary critic Edmund Wilson, who was instrumental in the republication of \u201cGatsby\u201d in 1941. Thanks to Wilson\u2019s efforts<\/a>, Fitzgerald\u2019s novel could be taken up by other well-regarded and influential scholars like Lionel Trilling, who wrote admiringly<\/a> about Fitzgerald in The Nation in 1945, and Malcolm Cowley<\/a>, who edited collections of Fitzgerald\u2019s short stories and celebrated his literary gifts.<\/p>\n After Trilling, a parade of writers took up Gatsby\u2019s cause, praising it for precisely the same traits that might also have been found in \u201cEx-Wife,\u201d had anyone bothered to look: its use of contemporary language, its critique of hedonistic behavior, its rich attention to period detail and its depressing portrayal of aimless, unmoored characters trying and failing to find meaning in modern America.<\/p>\n Consider just one instance of differential legacy-tending: during World War II, the American military provided over 150,000 free copies<\/a> of \u201cThe Great Gatsby\u201d to American soldiers \u2013 ensuring a readership that well exceeded the number of people who had, to date, actually bought the book.<\/p>\n But when the Victory Book Campaign<\/a> started its drive to collect novels for overseas servicemen, it explicitly warned potential donors to desist from handing over any \u201cwomen\u2019s love stories,\u201d specifically naming Ursula Parrott among the authors whose books they would not be putting in soldiers\u2019 hands.<\/p>\n There are, of course, many other factors at play here. There\u2019s the tendency to romanticize<\/a> the tragic lives of male authors who drink heavily, spend recklessly and make bad decisions \u2013 departments in which Fitzgerald and Parrott seem pretty equally matched.<\/p>\n There\u2019s also what can only be described as a collective refusal to categorize<\/a> \u201cThe Great Gatsby\u201d as a romance novel, a category that has historically been used to diminish women\u2019s writing<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cThe Great Gatsby\u201d\u2018s ascension from obscurity to ubiquity is only one example of how Parrott\u2019s book was passed over. \u201cEx-Wife\u201d and William Faulkner\u2019s \u201cThe Sound and the Fury<\/a>\u201d were marketed alongside each other by publishers Jonathan Cape and Harrison Smith. Faulkner biographer Carl Rollyson observes that Faulkner\u2019s book sold \u201cless than a tenth\u201d as many copies as Parrott\u2019s<\/a>. But Faulkner amassed critical praise in the right places, and Parrott, Rollyson concludes, \u201cdid not manage herself or her work the way writers like Faulkner did.\u201d<\/p>\n But this is not merely a question of self-management. It is true that Parrott did not publish during the last, difficult decade of her life. After a series of public scandals, missed deadlines, ongoing battles with alcohol and financial missteps, she tried to write herself back into literary society, to no avail.<\/p>\n The real difference, in my view, is that Parrott had nobody to tend to her legacy \u2013 no Trilling or Wilson or Cowley in her corner to bring her writings back into circulation or make a case for her genius or her novel\u2019s importance.<\/p>\n However, there is no reason to believe that the erasure of \u201cEx-Wife\u201d from cultural memory is a fait accompli, or that \u201cThe Great Gatsby\u201d will always be the go-to Jazz Age novel. Writer Glenway Wescott, in his February 1941 tribute to Fitzgerald<\/a>, wrote of \u201cThe Great Gatsby\u201d: \u201cA masterpiece often seems a period-piece for a while; then comes down out of the attic, to function anew and to last.\u201d<\/p>\n Consider this article a \u201cbetter late than never\u201d effort to make the case that \u201cEx-Wife\u201d deserves to come out of the attic of America\u2019s lost literary past to be read, discussed and taught as one of the important American novels of the 1920s.<\/p>\n After McNally Editions republished \u201cEx-Wife<\/a>\u201d in May 2023, reviewers remarked on the \u201cfreshness of its prose\u201d and the \u201cremarkable erotic freedom\u201d it depicted, as The New York Times<\/a> review put it; The Baffler described Parrott\u2019s writing<\/a> as \u201cdeftly crafted, wryly observed, and thoroughly unsettling.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThe Great Gatsby\u201d is a fantastic period piece. But \u201cEx-Wife\u201d manages to be both that and to remain timely. Women\u2019s lives and bodies continue to be subject to all manner of scrutiny, critique and legislation, which means that many of the things that Parrott wrote about in \u201cEx-Wife\u201d \u2013 the double standard, women in the workplace, work-life balance, rape and even abortion \u2013 remain astonishingly relevant today.<\/p>\n In \u201cEx-Wife\u201d \u2013 and in many of her 19 other books and over 100 stories \u2013 Parrott wrote from what amounts to Daisy Buchanan\u2019s point of view rather than Nick Carraway\u2019s, to use \u201cThe Great Gatsby\u201d again as a reference point.<\/p>\n Imagine what a different story \u201cGatsby\u201d would have been had the reader seen the world through Daisy\u2019s eyes?<\/p>\n Or don\u2019t imagine. Rather, give \u201cEx-Wife\u201d a read.<\/p>\n Marsha Gordon<\/a>, Professor of Film Studies, North Carolina State University<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n This article is republished from The Conversation<\/a> under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Writer Ursula Parrott, pictured with her son, Marc, in 1935.ACME Newspapers Marsha Gordon, North Carolina State University In 1925, F. Scott Fitzgerald published \u201cThe Great Gatsby.\u201d Four years later, Ursula Parrott published her first novel, \u201cEx-Wife.\u201d I probably read \u201cThe Great Gatsby\u201d a dozen times between junior high school and my late 20s. But I<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":5495,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[103,100,99,102,98,101],"ppma_author":[39],"class_list":{"0":"post-5494","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-womens-rights","8":"tag-exwife","9":"tag-gatsby","10":"tag-great","11":"tag-parrotts","12":"tag-read","13":"tag-ursula"},"yoast_head":"\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.neh.gov\/sites\/default\/files\/styles\/large\/public\/2023-04\/Ursula_w_son_Fig_12_Gordon.jpg?itok=LBc8_0fM\")
<\/a><\/p>\nGreeted by mixed reviews<\/h2>\n
Marsha Gordon<\/span>, CC BY-SA<\/a><\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/a>
Screen Splits<\/a><\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\nArt imitates life<\/h2>\n
AP Photos<\/span><\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\nGatsby\u2019s boosters<\/h2>\n
Bettmann\/Getty Images<\/a><\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\nMaking the case for \u2018Ex-Wife\u2019<\/h2>\n
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Moberly, Missouri Monitor<\/span><\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n