Muse of the Jazz Age
As Baz Luhrmann’s new interpretation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s best-known novel, The Great Gatsby, prepares to come to the screen, an interest in the writer and his muse is yet again resurfacing.
Seen by history as the embodiment of the jazz age, this husband and wife were famous as the decade’s legendary “golden” couple. During the beginnings of the 1920s, the public couldn’t get enough of this young, good-looking pair that seemingly just lived only for a good time. But Zelda was more than just a party girl (though her husband famously named her “the first American flapper.”); she had artistic aspirations of her own. She painted, wrote magazine articles, as well as danced (sometimes practicing up to 8 hours a day).
Taking advantage of the curiosity that Luhrmann’s film is bound to create, Therese Anne Fowler has released her book entitled “Z”, so we can yet again look at the life of the often maligned, constantly misunderstood but still frequently celebrated Zelda Fitzgerald.
Writing the lives of this couple as Zelda might have told it herself, Fowler constructs a tightly woven tale of that takes us from love to wreckage and the escape that they can never truly achieve from their own lives.
If you know little about the couple this is not a bad place to begin but be sure that there will be much written and seen of the Fitzgerald’s as the film’s premiere approaches at the end of next month.
Z - A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald is available through Booktopia for $23.95