Talk:Zelda Fitzgerald

Verdict, please

Scott’s wiki page says While at a country club, Fitzgerald met and fell in love with Zelda Sayre....

Zelda’s wiki page says Scott and Zelda's first encounter was in a train station, which Scott later wrote into The Great Gatsby.

Could we have an expert opinion, please? Valetude (talk) 20:18, 11 December 2015 (UTC)

@Valetude: Hi, Valetude --- According to her biographer Nancy Milford, Zelda's first encounter with Scott was at a country club dance in Montgomery. Scott later portrayed their first meeting fictionally, when he wrote it into his novel The Great Gatsby, when he describes Jay Gatsby's first encounter with Daisy Buchanan, although he transposed the location of the encounter to a train station in the novel.

I have edited Zelda's article to reflect this correction. Thanks for pointing out the discrepancy. --- Professor JR (talk) 20:58, 11 December 2015 (UTC)

References

Comment

I'd like to follow up on a comment made back in 2009. I've never posted on a Wikipedia talk page -- but when reading this entry for Fitzgerald, I was shocked to read the characterization of her, in the first paragraph, as one who "ruined" her husband's life. To me, this kind of comment seems more apropos to a checkout line gossip magazine than to an encyclopedia entry. Am I overreacting on this? Thanks. Justaservant (talk) 10:38, 24 July 2016 (UTC)

I have no references, but I'm sure you'll find confirmation that Hemingway saw her in this light. He greatly admired Scott's fiction-writing talent, and felt that she was a disruptive influence. Valetude (talk) 14:48, 5 December 2016 (UTC)

Ivylyy (talk) 02:26, 19 January 2022 (UTC) I don't think you're overreacting at all, I'm willing to believe that it was Hemingway's opinion, but I don't think that that piece of information should be right at the start of the article. Maybe it should be moved to a later section?

Characterizing women's "place" in Zelda's South

I would like to delete the generalization Southern women were expected to be delicate, docile and accommodating; Zelda was anything but. 1. Why only Southern women? 2. As the daughter of a state supreme court justice, Zelda did not live the life of most other women in Montgomery, Alabama. 3. Any city not Montgomery at the time was not identical to any city anywhere else. Willgargan (talk) 23:17, 29 January 2017 (UTC)

Novelist

I cannot see how she can be described in the lede as a novelist first. I have moved it to second. If she had not been the wife of Scott Fitzgerald, she would not merit a wiki page at all, as the author of just one novel which failed to sell, except posthumously as a historical curio, to do with her and her husband's fame as Jazz Age figures. Valetude (talk) 13:27, 16 May 2017 (UTC)

Recent Edits

I noticed the need for more updated sources on the talk page and took the liberty to go through Deborah Pike's The Subversive Art of Zelda Fitzgerald. I felt as if the article could benefit from this source (published in 2017) and attempted to match the writing style and tone of the article. More could be drawn from this biography as it would be good to change some of the Milford 1970 sources to Pike 2017 (and there was much overlap). This new source is obviously not objective, but I attempted to include only facts cited.

Thanks! And I'm open to suggestions and critique. Kaitlyndepew (talk) 00:30, 20 February 2018 (UTC)

things to add

i think you should add her husband STEALING and multiple pages of her diary for his books and taking all of the credit and her. writing reviews about true blantant plagiarism and add him talking about giving her mental breakdowns in his diary and aswell him locking her in rooms when she wanted a divorce Yurionlife (talk) 17:44, 24 December 2020 (UTC)

Yurionlife, do you have any reliable sources supporting those claims? Nikkimaria (talk) 02:10, 25 December 2020 (UTC)

Issues with this FA

I'm concerned about this article's status as an FA. These are the following issues:

• Lede is too short.
• Overuse of quoted material.
• I'm not a huge fan of the massive sections of text - subsections may help.
• Could the inline references be placed at the end of the sentence(s) rather than at the end of the paragraph?
• Unsourced material.
• Some of the prose seems more authorial than encyclopedic.

That's all. ~ HAL333 02:46, 19 March 2021 (UTC)

HAL333 could you please be more specific; it is hard to improve an article if one cannot understand the issues. I agree on the lead and the amount of quoted material. I disagree on sub-sections; what specifically do you think needs to be separated? I don't believe your preference against citations at the end of paragraphs is grounded in policy or guideline; could you provide an example of where you have concerns? The amount of unsourced material I see is minor; do you have examples? Please give an example of prose that is more "authorial than encyclpedic". SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:33, 19 March 2021 (UTC)

@ImaginesTigers and Flask: are you able to help out here? SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:36, 19 March 2021 (UTC)

An example of what I see as authorial would be: To their delight, in the pages of the New York newspapers Zelda and Scott had become icons of youth and success—enfants terribles of the Jazz Age.. I also feel that lines like "The parallels to the Fitzgeralds were obvious." should not be written in Wikipedia's voice but instead attributed. On second thought, the three middle sections could just use some images rather than subsections. On the paragraph citation issue, look at the fifth paragraph of the "Marriage" section. Why not place the individual cited pages directly after the dependent material? Page 125 of Cline can probably support some of that text on its own rather than the page range. (I'm not sure if I explained that well...) Of course, I am still a relative novice and could be completely wrong about this. ~ HAL333 16:23, 19 March 2021 (UTC)

Thanks-- this gives editors wanting to improve the article more to work with. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 16:27, 19 March 2021 (UTC)

I agree with HAL333's concerns about this article, but I would add other criticisms as well. The use of a single source—Milford 1970—for most of the content seems odd. Much scholarly research about Zelda has been undertaken by Matthew J. Bruccoli, James L. West III, and others since Milford's 1970 publication, yet little of this newer research appears in this article. Consequently, various claims are over 50 years out-of-date. For example: Drafts of Save Me the Waltz were analyzed, and the changes demanded by Scott were fewer than previously assumed (Bruccoli 1991, p. 4). "The revisions Scott finally demanded were actually relatively few, and that the disagreement was quickly resolved, with Scott recommending the novel to Perkins" (Bryer & Barks 2009, p. 164).

The article also gives the impression that the failure of Save Me the Waltz forever crushed Zelda's spirits and that the novel was her last attempt at creative writing. This is factually dubious. After writing the novel, Zelda next embarked upon a career as a playwright and wrote the stage play Scandalabra in Fall 1932 (Bruccoli 2002, p. 343). The play was later produced and staged in Baltimore (see Scottie's preamble in The Collected Writings of Zelda Fitzgerald, 1991). Yet there is no mention of these events in the article, and their omission lends undue weight to the failure of Save Me the Waltz.

Furthermore, despite using Milford (1970) as its primary source, the article omits key events in Milford's biography that chronicle Zelda's mental deterioration such as her attempts to kill herself and her child by driving a car over a cliff (see Milford 1970, p. 156). These omissions give the misleading impression that Zelda was hospitalized without due reason. Even more odd is the article's implications about Zelda's institutionalization (i.e., "Scott placed her in..."). As documented in her biographies and her letters, Zelda often insisted on being hospitalized over Scott's objections (see Bruccoli 2002, p. 320: "Zelda insisted that she wanted to be hospitalized"). Scott objected because, as a miser, he didn't want to pay the hospital bills. Hence, it's peculiar how the article phrases these events in a way that gives the opposite impression.

In my view, this article needs a rewrite as its current state gives an incomplete and misleading picture of Zelda's life. The fact that the majority of Zelda's later years were not spent imprisoned in mental institutions should have greater emphasis. Currently, one walks away from this article with the mistaken impression that Zelda's final years were akin to the doomed Dauphin of France. -- Flask (talk) 19:27, 19 March 2021 (UTC)

Zelda's Assessment of Her Husband, At His Death

Many descriptions of Zelda and Scott's marriage dwell on his drunkenness, their fights, and his use of her private letters and diary in his novels. To get a fair idea of what their relationship was like, and how she actually saw Fitzgerald, it's important to read the words she wrote at his death:

       "I grieve for his brilliant talent, his faithful effort to keep me under the very best of expensive care
        and Scottie in school; his devotion to those he felt were contributing to the aesthetic and spiritual purposes
        of life--and for his generous and vibrant soul that never spared itself, and never found anything too much trouble
        save the fundamentals of life itself. That he won't be here to arrange nice things and tell us what to do is
        grievous to envisage....he was as comprehensive and intelligent and gratifying a friend as I could ever have found--
        and he loved you dearly."
                To Gerald and Sara Murphy, late December 1940, Letters from the Lost Generation, p. 261

Younggoldchip (talk) 16:54, 7 January 2022 (UTC)

Wrong sentence

"Ernest Hemingway, whom Fitzgerald disliked, blamed her for her husband's declining literary output."

This sentence does not make sense, please change it so that it does. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2A02:AB04:3151:6600:180E:9AA7:525D:7C9D (talk) 16:40, 27 April 2022 (UTC)

Discussion of edits by Hannibpop

Hello @Hannibpop: / @24.162.33.222:

I again cordially invite you to discuss your previous edits with me on this Talk Page. Note that your very first edit accused others of acting in bad faith contrary to WP:AGF. When I invited you to discuss the edits on this Talk Page in order to reach a consensus per WP:BRD, you instead filed a report on the Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard with false accusations. Despite both of these unwarranted actions, I nonetheless continue to invite you to engage in a discussion with me per WP:BRD. — Flask (talk) 19:38, 20 April 2023 (UTC)

"... became regarded ..."

Maybe I'm just imagining it, but "became regarded" feels quite awkward. Toddcs (talk) 20:46, 1 November 2023 (UTC)