Published in 1929 (originally anonymously), this is by Ursula Parrott (1899-1957).

It was this article by Marsha Gordon, Parrott's biographer, that drew my interest back in 2023. Its headline asked provocatively: "Why have you read The Great Gatsby but not Ursula Parrott’s Ex-Wife?"

Gatsby has been everywhere of late, as Scott Fitzgerald's most famous work turned 100 on the tenth of this month. So it definitely felt like a good time to even the score a bit by tackling Ex-Wife.

Gordon admits she hadn't heard of Parrott either until she happened upon a screenplay adaptation of one of her stories: "Fitzgerald, in fact, had been hired to write that screenplay. Even though Infidelity was never produced because it was deemed too risque by Hollywood’s Production Code Administration, its very existence piqued my curiosity. 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?"

Well, we'll get into the Gatsby comparison in a minute, but Parrott was far from an unknown writer in her day: "Both Ex-Wife and The Great Gatsby are modern novels of love and loss, money and (mostly bad) manners. They’re set in New York and saturated with the energy, language and spirit of the time. Both garnered mixed reviews, deemed by many critics as entertaining and of the moment but not great literature. At first, Ex-Wife was far more successful than Gatsby, 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. Meanwhile, The Great Gatsby went through a mere two printings totaling less than 24,000 copies, not all of which sold. By the time Fitzgerald died in 1940, the novel had essentially been forgotten."


Available at Internet Archive

Gordon goes on to very pithily summarize the message of Ex-Wife: "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 The Great Gatsby and the novel’s scant attention to the experiences of its female characters... [It was] 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. But in shedding these mores, they also sacrificed protections." It is possible to argue, as the protagonist of Ex-Wife does, that "freedom for women turned out to be God's greatest gift to men".

The novel opens like this: "My husband left me four years ago. Why -- I don't precisely understand, and never did. Nor, I suspect, does he." A few paragraphs further on, she suggests: "He grew tired of me; hunted about for reasons to justify his weariness; and found them. They seemed valid to him. I suppose if I had tired of him, I should have done the same thing."

She hasn't tired of him, however, not at this point anyway. She's 24. She begs him to stay. He won't.

He's Peter, or Pete. She's Patricia, or Pat, or Patty. And as we hear more of her story, we're far more grieved that she wants him to stay than that the marriage has fallen apart.

The double standard is blindingly obvious. It's supposed to be a very open relationship -- they toss around "theories about the right to experiment and the desirability of varied experience" -- but when Pete sleeps with someone else, this is OK, whereas when Pat sleeps with someone else, it's suddenly clear that all those theories didn't apply to THEM.

There's a raft of other problems, though. Pete is utterly callous with regard to the death of their baby, and makes no attempt to understand his wife's grief. He has a good line in manipulation and verbal abuse ("So pretty, too bad you are a slut"), and resorts more than once to actual violence.

When Pat gets pregnant again, he is not interested in keeping the baby, and even threatens to kill her when she comes up with a scenario that would accommodate the baby, but edge out his then side-interest: "He did not kill me. He just picked me up and threw me through the glass door of the breakfast room..." She has to have a stitch in her arm.

That whole section is a litany of male put-downs. Pat goes to see a doctor, and tells him she wants an abortion. He says he won't do it, but he knows someone who will. Someone who is "what you might call hard-boiled"... She tells Pete. He replies: "Your show. Hope it's not too bad." The doctor goes with her to the clinic. In fact, he kind of makes a pass at her: "I should appreciate the privilege of taking you to dinner sometime, when you've forgotten about this whole -- unfortunate -- affair."


Parrott, 1931

Anyway, the pair part. Pat goes to live with Lucia, another divorcee, who shows her the ropes of surviving alone. There's lots of fun to be had as a beautiful single woman in New York in the 1920s, Parrott tells us, but there's also an aching emptiness, and a terrible insecurity.

"You're an ex-wife, Pat," Lucia explains, going on to emphasize that this is the most important thing people need to know about her... "[It] explains everything else, that you were once married to a man who left you... An ex-wife is a woman with a crick in the neck from looking back over her shoulder at her matrimony... An ex-wife... is just a surplus woman."

Lucia is very sceptical about the "freedom" that women have gained. "Free to pay our own rent, and buy our own clothes, and put up with the eccentricities of three to eight men who have authority over us in business, instead of having to please just one husband... The principal thing that relieving women from the dullness of domesticity did, was to relieve men from any necessity of offering stability in return for love, fidelity and so on."

It's easy to decry Lucia's cynical, almost defeatist, conservatism. Drawing on Gordon's biography, Jessica Fletcher comments: "Ex-Wife traces burgeoning anti-feminist attitudes among young upper-middle-class white women and their reactionary appeal to chivalry... Gordon indicates that Parrott’s outward vociferous rejection of feminism sat uneasily alongside her enthusiasm for 'the cigarette-smoking female intelligenzia [sic]' she discovered in her archival research [carried out on behalf of the married journalist, Hugh O'Connor, who was her lover], and her female characters in Ex-Wife exhibit similar instances of internalized misogyny paired awkwardly with interest in and sympathy for other women."

Returning to traditional gender roles won't help, pace Lucia, but it is clear from Ex-Wife that it's also hard to truly shake them off. Coincidentally, I had only just read this passage in Lyndsey Stonebridge's study of Hannah Arendt (post later): "Modern life had pushed any promised freedoms of the Athenian polis out of reach. By the mid-twentieth century, many women, slaves and workers had been 'emancipated' from the labour of providing the necessities of life for privileged male citizens, only to discover that they were not very free at all, at least not politically. People were still toiling away, but now in the service of a consumer culture that exploited not only their labour but the intimacies of their most private lives. Coaxed out of the shadows by promises of autonomy and self-determination, all that modern social life had delivered to the marginalized, so [Arendt] thought, was the freedom to try and be yourself in a world that dictated the terms upon which that freedom was acceptable. Women and slaves have learned the hard way to be suspicious when they are finally invited to the party."

For Lucia, there are three options for ex-wives. The first is celibacy and business success ("simply because there is a limit to the amount of vitality a woman has to expend, altogether"); the second is just "adventuring about" socially and sexually, birth control having made chastity redundant (but Lucia says not many women can genuinely embrace what is described as a masculine zest for endless relationships that are regarded as just a bit of fun -- not to mention the fact that birth control methods are obviously not that reliable); the third is remarriage...

Meanwhile, Pat still pines for Pete, bastard though he is. She meets up with him far more times than we feel is good for her.

And she is very vulnerable, at one point finding herself lured by someone she thought she could trust to the apartment of a man called Stepan. She has already rejected Stepan's advances, and has been told he was out of town. But, in a terrifying scene, she wakes up to find him there, and he rapes her. You might think this far-fetched, but the incident is based on something that actually happened to Parrott. Fletcher notes: "[She] wrote that the men 'thought their attack "ever so funny"'; afterward, she was suicidal. Their chilling merriment is not included in Ex-Wife, but the persistent threats young women encountered once they were deemed sexually available recur throughout the novel."

Yet Pat is socially successful. She has some solid female friends, plenty of male admirers, and also a trio of supportive, no-strings relationships with men who genuinely care for her. And she's professionally successful. She starts out as a fashion copy-writer for a department store. She does well, and is promoted to assistant advertising manager: "I had, already, a private office with a desk and a rug and a typewriter and a window and a telephone that rang twenty times an hour." The glimpses into her working life are fascinating.

It's also true that it was difficult then -- just as it is difficult now -- to juggle marriage and career. The ambitious young copy-writer who's Pat's junior tells her she wants to get married, but her young man insists that she give up her job (which she is very good at). He's 22, six months older than she is. Incurably romantic old Pat tells her to marry him... Later, however, having duly given up her job, the young woman returns to take on Pat's role when she leaves, because her husband wasn't earning much, and they weren't making ends meet. But the problem is still not solved, because now hubbie is jealous that she makes more money than he does... She plans to leave him for a while. Especially as he's spending nights with someone "who's supposed to understand him better". Seriously...


By Porter Woodruff, 1921

Eventually, Pat is officially divorced: "It's so SILLY to mind," she tells herself. "Just an incident in the career of a Modern Woman. What the hell! But I never expected it to happen to me." Lucia, meanwhile, is planning to remarry. Someone very dull, but well able to provide for her.

Then Pat meets Noel. They get on really well. But there's a snag. A kind of Gatsby-meets-Jane-Eyre snag. Noel already has a wife, Beatrice, whom he cannot turn his back on. He married just before setting off to fight in France in the war, but while he was away, she fell in love with someone else. When he returned, they met to discuss the issue. But he was drunk when he drove her home; there was an accident, and she was left terribly disfigured (she wears a mask over the left half of her face). After that, the man she actually wanted to marry changed his mind... So she's still married to Noel; and she's very clear that's how she wants things to stay.

Noel is a nice guy. He's unfazed by Pat's freewheeling recent past. ("He did not look disgusted or shocked or even surprised... He said, "... Whatever happened to you has made you poised and tolerant, and comprehending, and anyone who knows you should be grateful for whatever produced the result.'... Something in me that had hurt horribly at odd moments, for a long, long time, stopped hurting for ever.") But he cannot commit to Pat, while Beatrice -- now pregnant -- is in the picture. Beatrice has been refusing to allow Noel to take up a good position overseas. But Pat -- in an act of noble self-sacrifice -- tells her she will give up Noel, if Beatrice will agree to this move that will advance his career so significantly.

Again, all this might sound overwrought. But Parrott -- frustrated that O'Connor for years refused to leave his wife, and then, even after the couple had finally gone their separate ways, wanted to keep Parrott as his mistress, with no prospect of marriage or children -- described her life's scenario as "such an old Victorian plot", and continues: "It makes me a little sick to recognize it. The woman 'gives her all' to a man without marriage, and he 'spurns' her, finally."

If Noel is modelled on O'Connor, you wonder whether Parrott might ever have wanted to revise the character... When Ex-Wife became a huge financial success, Parrott offered to pay O'Connor a stipend that equalled his salary with the New York Times: "In return, she asked to live as his wife for that year and to take any pregnancies to term -- at this point she had had at least two abortions, one at his request. He refused, and they separated a couple of years later. Her newly earned financial capital did little to shift the power balance of their relationship and created new tensions between them."

Parrott seems to have been extraordinarily unlucky with men. Alissa Bennett writes: "Her first marriage, to the journalist Lindesay Parrott Sr, ended in divorce in 1926, the year he discovered that the childless marriage he had insisted upon was not so childless after all. In 1924, Ursula had learned that she was pregnant and left the couple’s London home for Boston, where she gave birth to her only son before depositing him in the custody of her father and older sister. It was a secret that she managed to keep from Lindesay and their glamorous circle of friends for an astonishing two years. Marc Parrott... would never have a relationship with his father. He was nearly seven years old when his mother finally acknowledged her maternity and assumed responsibility for his care." Parrott, who had a degree in English from Radcliffe, had been aiming for a career as a journalist. But she found among the New York newspapers nothing but closed doors, as her ex-husband "marked his professional territory by warning the city’s editors -- all male, of course -- not to hire her".

Anyway, back to Pat... She finally agrees to marry Nathaniel, one of her longstanding supporters. He's not worried about her "gaudy past" either, and is generally a good egg. Neither of them is passionately in love with the other, but well, companionship is a fine thing too. Pat muses: "I wanted to say -- to God or Noel or someone who would understand: 'I have travelled such a long way, all the way through youth, I think, and I am so tired. You must not blame me too much, for taking what shelter offers, now.'"

Even as the couple are setting out on a new life (by way of a voyage round the world), memories of Noel come back. "Remembrances enfolded me warmly -- ebbed, ebbed and were gone. I stood alone, in a room with Nathaniel."

Will it work out? Well, I would put no money on it. The novel closes with Nat promising to be very good to her, while she promises she will be the perfect wife:

"I did mean it.

"Yet I shall hope, through all my youth, through all my life, that in some far city I shall find my love again.

"New York lights blurred behind us... That was a shining city."

***

A propos of which, another of the book's strengths is that the place and the time are superbly rendered.

Among the many evocative descriptions of New York, for example, we have this: "October's the pleasantest month of the year, in New York. Cool days succeed one another crescendo, like states of mind in convalescence after fever. The air is so clear that edges of tall buildings are etched against the sky, sharp and clean as lines in Chinese paintings... Evenings sparkle with a feeling of things-about-to-happen-fast-again, many theatres opening, everyone giving parties to people back from Paris with gay or ridiculous stories about everyone else who was there."

One chapter is punctuated by snippets of Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue score:



And the era... It's clear we're in the wild twenties. This is Pat: "I wished that Heaven were real to me, and wondered why it was not, to me or any contemporaries I knew. The Victorians had been able to leave things to God -- or the next generation. But the sound of guns and the knowledge of the immediacy of death and the desire to live as swiftly as possible, in the little time that youth and capacity to live swiftly, lasted -- had got between that next generation and any whispering of angels. Perhaps that was it -- it did not matter why, really -- we had to get on without Heaven as best we could."

And living without heaven means living it up. It's the era of bobbed hair; of furs, tweeds, and boutonnieres; of dressing up in "a dull green jersey dress and beige stockings and brown alligator shoes", and pulling "a beige hat down over my right eye and up over my left". It's the era of Harlem dance halls, and speakeasies, and highballs, and something delicious called Creme Yvette...

And it's the era of prodigious drinking... Marc Parrott, Ursula's son, writes in an Afterword to the 1989 edition of the book (the one I read): "People drink in Ex-Wife. I am sixty-four, and I do not think anyone under sixty can remember what a drinking society was, a whole society that drank on that scale... One of my earliest impressions, when I left my grandfather's Boston house after he died and came to join my mother in New York, was that a third of the grown-ups were fairly tight, or drunk -- one did learn the gradations -- by dinnertime, especially on weekends. It was pervasive."

At one point, Pat reminisces about the feats of their earlier days: "How few, Lucia, how melancholily few, ever knew that beautiful swinging-of-the-spheres sensation toward the end of a hard-drinking evening... when one could pass out, or laugh rather noisily about divers absurdities that occur to one... but does neither, just breathes very evenly, and goes on talking in a low voice about the sources of anti-Ku-Klux feeling in the South, or some such subject... and feels on the edge of knowing what one really thinks about everything. How few, how sadly few..."

Alcohol is a useful buffer against reality: "Thank Heaven for Scotch. Everything swims gorgeously, not real any more. Vistas in hell, but a well-anaesthetized hell."

Pat and Pete meet for dinner, well after the split has happened, and his language is reminiscent of Malcolm Lowry's Geoffrey Firmin: "He talked about going to hell gaudily, in the tropical tradition, via some Central American Revolution. 'When I have been drinking five or six more years, Patty, I'll get out. Buy me a sombrero with silver coins jangling, and a sash and two pistols, and end up merrily on mezcal.'"

The interesting thing, though, is that Ex-Wife, despite its resonant evocation of its era, is full of moments that are still totally recognizable. Much of it feels very familiar -- because, all these years later, we're still grappling with these same issues...

Francine Prose, in her 1989 introduction, writes: "It's striking how much of Ex-Wife seems far less dated than many of Fitzgerald's Jazz Age stories -- we feel we are hearing how real people actually spoke. Partly, this is because these characters sound so much like WE do."



***

So, why, given its obvious merits, has this book been largely forgotten, while Fitzgerald's is still widely feted?

It's certainly true that Parrott's life went more and more wildly off the rails as the years went by. Her son, in his Afterword, describes her utter profligacy with money: Ex-Wife showed her she could earn big, and she easily adjusted to spending big; so she would spend everything she had, and then write some more... There were a number of scandals. "Always trouble-prone," as he puts it, "she steadily lost control of her life" over the course of the 1940s and 1950s. She died, of a fast-moving cancer, in the charity ward of a New York hospital, at the age of 58. Her son thinks she registered under a false name, because there was still a warrant out against her in the State of New York. "My mother," he concludes, "lived for a while like the king in the Yeats poem who packed his wedding day with parades and concerts and volleys of cannon: 'that the night come.' It came for my mother, in ruinous style; but she may have felt that the day was well worthwhile."

Fitzgerald's life was not exactly scandal-free either... But then, as Gordon says, "There’s the tendency to romanticize the tragic lives of male authors who drink heavily, spend recklessly and make bad decisions -- departments in which Fitzgerald and Parrott seem pretty equally matched."

Gordon has another explanation: "I’m convinced that the reason Fitzgerald’s 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 over the arc of the 20th century."

Fitzgerald had a number of "important friends and admirers", who worked to make sure his oeuvre was not forgotten. From the 1940s, "a parade of writers took up Gatsby’s cause, praising it for precisely the same traits that might also have been found in Ex-Wife, 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".

I was astonished to read that the US military apparently provided over 150,000 free copies of The Great Gatsby to American servicemen. That's way more copies than had been bought by readers up to that point... The Victory Book Campaign, on the other hand, said "women's love stories" shouldn't be included among books donated to the armed forces, and specifically named Parrott as one of the authors of such works.

So it's time to bring her back, says Gordon. And Bennett agrees: "If the book was once too far ahead of its day and later too far behind, it seems now somehow just right, as though we have rounded the circle again and finally found synchronicity. Wedged between Edith Wharton’s constrained society girls and the squandered glamour of Jean Rhys’s doomed wanderers, Ex-Wife was received by an interstitial America still negotiating who and what women were allowed to be. Once caught in a cultural riptide, the book now reads as a shockingly anticipatory account of what it means to want and what it means to be left; we live in a world now where most of us know the feeling of both."

It's also, I might add, a damn good read.