Zelda Fitzgerald and her husband’s leading ladies

I've recently become part of the regular feature-writing team for Exeposé Books, which is very exciting! Here's one of my first two 'audition pieces', as like to call them.

With the recent release of Baz Luhrmann’s unspeakably glitzy take on The Great Gatsby, the unreachable Daisy Buchananfeels like a familiar character. But the rest of F Scott Fitzgerald’s novels are studded with complicated female stars too. Brilliant yet flawed, each draws her inspiration from one source, tragically close to the author’s heart – ‘a vivacious blond who had hoards of suitors’ – Fitzgerald’s wife, Zelda.

In Fitzgerald’s second novel, The Beautiful and the Damned, Gloria Patch is restricted by a role which would not have been unfamiliar to a woman of Zelda’s status.  As the wife of the heir to a phenomenal fortune, she has already achieved her sole aim in life: to snare a rich husband. Her subsequent, dangerous lack of occupation is questioned in the novel. Once Gloria has fulfilled her quest to marry into money, her life becomes empty and the only path open to her, at least in her mind, is the descent into alcoholism and idleness. Sadly, Fitzgerald saw this phenomenon of the rich and reckless in his own life, and particularly in Zelda. Gloria clearly shares his wife’s tendency towards reckless, irresponsible and selfish behaviour; the portrayal of the Patches’ idle lives evokesFitzgerald’s concern that, in the early years of the 1920s, their own lives were growing dangerously close to becoming a circus of bingeing and self-indulgence.

Perhaps the character who draws most on Zelda for inspiration is Nicole Diver of Tender is the Night, the last completed novel that Fitzgerald would write. Again, her only apparent vocation is to be one half of a rich and glamorous couple, but, like Zelda in reality, she is of course much more complex. In the novel, Nicole is admitted to a sanatorium in Switzerland with acute neurosis, where her future husband Dick is a psychoanalyst. It is clear that Fitzgerald is directly referring to one of Zelda's many admittances to sanatoria, where she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. During her stay at one institution, Zelda wrote her first and only published novel, a semi-autobiography, Save Me the Waltz. Although Scott was incensed that she had published such personal material, he would do exactly that with Tender Is the Night, even lifting extracts directly from Zelda’s own diary and letters she had written to him from the psychiatric ward. In spite of their challenging conditions, both Nicole and Zelda desired a career and independence from their husbands. For Nicole, this took the form of psychiatry; meanwhile, as the vivid, moving prose of Save Me the Waltz suggests, Zelda desired recognition of her own writing.

Each of Fitzgerald’s leading ladies is a reflection of his life with Zelda in some way, be it in the portrayal of her fragile mental state or of the hollow, frivolous lifestyle they shared. But most readers are of the opinion that none of his characters manage to capture her vivacity or her enormous complexity. There are naturally glimpses of her in her own novel, but as her husband forbade her to publish anything more and she never completed her second novel after his death, it seems unlikely that we can ever know or comprehend the real Zelda Fitzgerald.

The mad, bad and probably most intriguing family of the 20th Century -the Mitford sisters in writing and popular culture.

This is the second of my two pieces for Exeposé Books. It's a re-jig of a piece I had already written on the Mitford sisters (yes, them again), but they're some of my favourite people to read and write about and so I hope you'll forgive me for bringing them up again! 

For those who don't spend their time with their nose in endless books about the inconceivably crazy antics of minor aristocrats (who doesn't?), the Mitfords were a family whose lives were full of outrageous coincidences. Their story would be thought of as highly unrealistic at the very least; the Mitfords' parents, by some act of fate, missed their journey on the maiden voyage of the Titanic and their fifth child, the infamous Nazi-lover Unity, was conceived in a Canadian town called Swastika - and given the middle name Valkyrie. Add into the mix their family connections to Winston Churchill as well as the current Royal Family, and they could be the creation of an over-zealous writer.

There were seven Mitford children in all, including a brother, Tom, who was sadly consigned to obscurity, despite his scandalous schooldays at Eton. It would be Tom's six sisters - Nancy, Pamela, Diana, Unity, Jessica and Deborah - who would go down in history, or perhaps in infamy.

The latest work about this strange sextet is Lyndsy Spence’s The Mitford Girls’ Guide to Life, published in August 2013. In the midst of such a wealth of existing writing about and by the sisters, Spence is challenged with creating an original and entertaining version of their story. Her idea of portraying theMitfords’ lives through a guide to English high society in the middle years of the twentieth century, is a fun and novel one, and we learn how the girls might  have coped with modern life. Pamela's guide to throwing a jubilee party, Nancy's guide to fashion or Diana's tips on how to stay young all feature in this endearing compendium. It’s far from a laborious, detailed biography, but this was always supposed to be a clean, informal glance at the Mitfords’ lives.

Aside from Unity, who died in 1948 after earlier attempting suicide in a Munich park at the outbreak of the Second World War, each of the sisters has published her memoirs. Jessica’sHons and Rebels and Deborah’s Wait For Me are two of the most loved by the ever-growing number of twenty-first century Mitford fans. Meanwhile, Nancy is best remembered for her novels Love in a Cold Climate and The Pursuit of Love.

It was in contemporary British popular culture, though, that the elder sisters would first find fame with their well-known friends, the earliest set of Bright Young People. Rushing around London, falling into and out of the most over-the-top fancy dress parties, cocktails in hand, the young inter-war generation lived fast and partied hard. After Evelyn Waugh, author of Brideshead Revisited and observer of these wild antics, separated from his wife, he became obsessed with Diana and even dedicated his novel Vile Bodies to her. The novel went on to be adapted by Stephen Fry into the film Bright Young Things in 2003.

In spite of their polarising reputations  and decadent lifestyles, in her 2001 biography The Mitford Girls – The Biography of An Extraordinary Family, biographer Mary S Lovell is at pains to emphasise that the women always stuck together.  Despite a wide age gap - Nancy, the eldest, was sixteen when her youngest sister Debo was born - they remained close throughout their lives, perhaps even more so in adulthood than they had been as children. An abridged and condensed collection of their vast number of letters was edited by Diana’s daughter-in-law Charlotte Mosley –Letters Between Six Sisters is a hefty volume, but it captures a version of the women very rarely glimpsed, even in their memoirs. Their letters portray an obvious love of life and vivacious nature which would characterise them as much as their infamous deeds.

Perhaps the reason that many are still so absorbed in the sisters' unique stories – even after the publication of innumerable biographies, memoirs and homages such as Spence’s – is that the Mitfords were such vibrant, interesting people. Yes, they were hugely flawed, of course; what with their associations with the far-right and some certainly questionable morals, they were not exactly salubrious company. But every biographer appears so in awe of them and portrays each of their lives in such a way that it is impossible to avoid being swept along with them, through the débutantedances, the summer tours of Europe, the wild parties of inter-war London. Maybe it is because their lives are so incomprehensible and far-moved from our own that generation after generation is drawn to their fantastical stories.

Blood, Sweets and Tears - The Great British Bake Off, Series 4

This year I've signed up to write for the university newspaper, Exeposé and student magazine Razz. Just in case you're not in Exeter or you just haven't got around to picking up a copy of either the paper or the magazine, I thought it might be a nice idea to show you the pieces I'm writing for them here on my blog...

With custard thefts, crying contestants and more blood than an episode of Casualty, the fourth series of The Great British Bake Off could easily be mistaken for a primetime drama instead of the search for the nation’s greatest amateur baker.

The introduction of the first baker’s dozen of contestants was the only change to the successful format. The three tasks set each week - the Signature Bake, Technical Challenge and Showstopper – are judged by master baker Paul Hollywood and queen of puddings Mary Berry, who decide which baker (or two) to send home. While producers insisted that this year’s standard would be higher than ever, some poor bakes in Week 1 left a bitter taste in viewers’ mouths; these thirteen bakers were supposedly the cream of a 10 000-strong crop, a record number of applicants for the programme.

But after this nervous start, there have been moments of pure baking brilliance. In Week 3, Paul and Mary declared Beca’s stunning petits fours, comprising mini macarons and millionaire’s shortbread, ‘perfect.’ Christine aced Week 5’s Showstopper challenge with her shortbread Bavarian clock tower and Frances’ Edith Piaf-inspired puff pastries (no, really) earned her the coveted title of Star Baker in Week 7.

As the competition heads towards the final, it’s tricky to pick out front-runners from the all-female line up. Kimberley and her unusual flavour combinations were probably the early favourite, but well-executed traditional approaches by Welsh choir singer Beca and Christine, Mary Berry’s secret sister, have gone down a treat. Eccentric Frances seems finally to have addressed her initial ‘style over substance’ imbalance, while student baker Ruby could win if she carries on fluttering her eyelashes at Paul.

After a somewhat soggy-bottomed start, The Great British Bake Off is back to its best – delivering mouth-watering bakes with a generous helping of innuendo. Spotted dick, anyone?

Verdict - 4/5