HEY LADIES

And the fellas too! Welcome to Fem Fri.

I’ve been reading a lot about the Fitzgeralds lately, and as a result today’s Fem Friday is all about Zelda, who was talented, beautiful and F Scott Fitzgerald’s wife. There are some particularly haunting quotations in this New Yorker story about her ballet career. Something that I think about often is that Zelda started ballet dancing at twenty five and by twenty seven was good enough to join a ballet company. As ballet is usually as something you can only do if you start at three years old, this is very inspiring:

“I’ll tell you about my mother,” Lanahan said of Zelda and Scott’s only child, Scottie Fitzgerald. “She felt her mother’s curse was that she had so much talent it was hard for her to focus on one.” Dancing was an achievement that Zelda wanted completely for herself.

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/zelda-fitzgeralds-ballet-years

DID YOU NOTICE that Zelda and Francis Scott Fitzgerald called their daughter Frances Scott Fitzgerald? I intermittently strongly approve and strongly disapprove of this. Send your thoughts and ideas on the topic to the usual address. If you called your daughter Frances Scott Fitzgerald, I think you’re great.

Here’s something else: Zelda’s novel, Save Me The Waltz, about the ballet learning time of her life. If you’ve read Scott’s Tender Is The Night, this covers the same period and I think you’ll really enjoy it. This link isn’t to a proper ebook and you might object strongly to the fact that her main character is called Alabama, I recommend that you ride these objections out:

There is a brightness and bloom over things; she inspects life proudly, as if she walked in a garden forced by herself to grow in the least hospitable of soils. She is already contemptuous of ordered planting, believing in the possibility of a wizard cultivator to bring forth sweet-smelling blossoms from the hardest of rocks, and night-blooming vines from barren wastes, to plant the breath of twilight and to shop with marigolds. She wants life to be easy and full of pleasant reminiscences.

http://fitzgerald.narod.ru/zelda/waltz1.html

Finally, let’s not forget that the Fitzgeralds really effectively ruined one another’s lives, as outlined by Kate Beaton here:

http://www.harkavagrant.com/index.php?id=197

Happy weekend, team! Don't let anyone ruin your life,

Alex xx.