![]() ![]() (Of these, only Ex-Wife is currently in print, in a new edition.) In her prime in the 1930s Parrott was earning the equivalent of hundreds of thousands of dollars a year like Fitzgerald, she found a financially bounteous market in such magazines as The Saturday Evening Post, Cosmopolitan, Redbook, and Ladies’ Home Journal. ![]() This rueful-wise voice of Parrott’s divorcées set the tone for much of her writing from 1929 to 1947, when she published approximately 130 works: novels, stories, novelettes, and serials. “An ex-wife is a young woman for whom the eternity promised in the marriage ceremony is reduced to three years or five or eight,” wrote Parrott in Ex-Wife. But in the 1920s to be a woman was to find oneself with no specific role and to confront a radically altered landscape in which the confining security of the past could no longer be taken for granted. In the pre-war world to be a woman was to inhabit a role the essence of the role was duty. ![]() Like Fitzgerald but from a woman’s perspective, Parrott examined the fraying social fabric in the aftermath of World War I, the final vestiges of a Victorian era in which the place of a woman was defined almost exclusively in reference to men: fathers, husbands, ex-husbands, lovers. In the trajectory of her career as in its vicissitudes, Parrott is more akin to Fitzgerald than to Hemingway, whose expatriate characters and stark themes of war, manly valor, and the ubiquity of death-in-life take him far from the domestic dramas of romantic disillusion, marital strife, and divorce that preoccupied Parrott and Fitzgerald and made them, each for a vertiginous while, rich. Seemingly out of nowhere, precociously aphoristic and coolly unsentimental, the debut novel Ex-Wife appeared in 1929 to much scandalized acclaim originally published anonymously, it brought a life-altering celebrity to its hitherto unknown author, Ursula Parrott, just thirty years old, who found herself not only controversial and an immediate best seller but, more questionably, something of a spokesperson for the “new woman” of the era-a female counterpart to her almost exact contemporaries Ernest Hemingway and F. Lord, I have been more chased than chaste. ![]()
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