Did you know that the famous Nintendo character Princess Zelda is named after Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald? True story. And Zelda Fitzgerald was the princess of the Jazz Age in her own right.
Hailing from Montgomery, Alabama, Zelda Sayre met F. Scott Fitzgerald--then a young soldier from St. Paul, MN--at a country club dance. They were together briefly, and then he was stationed in New York. They continued to write each other, but Zelda had refused to marry him until his first novel, This Side of Paradise, was published. It was, in 1920, and a week later they were married. What neither Scott nor Zelda seemed to understand was that they were two sides of the same coin, romantically egotistical in the firm belief that they were born to do great things.
Their rise to fame and the subsequent descent into alcoholism and the slow crumble of their marriage are infamous events, but Zelda's true role in Scott's life and writing is perhaps less well-known.
Zelda was an avid diary-keeper, and she had shown her journals to her husband. He promptly used these journals, as well as their own lives and characters, to complete his semi-autobiographical novels. Zelda is, in parts, Rosalind Connage, Daisy Buchanan, Gloria, and Nicole Diver.
In fact, Tender is the Night is essentially seen as Scott's take on the marriage, while Zelda had her own opinion published to little acclaim in her book, Save Me the Waltz. Scott had not wanted her to publish this book because he felt it would detract from his own work, for which he was drawing on the same shared experiences as she.
The picture more recently painted of the Fitzgerald's life is one of an alcoholic, jealously controlling husband who was envious of his wife's talent and routinely plagiarized her private writing, and that of a talented wife who chafed under the pressure of her husband's fame and whose creative literary spirit was oppressed. Whatever the case, it is certainly true that their turbulent marriage was fraught with passion--both good and bad.
No matter what else may be said about Zelda Fitzgerald, she was a force to be reckoned with, and she had talent that her husband was intelligent enough to recognize. Her life was filled with struggle and pain, but she left behind the memory of a life lived with voracity.
"Her face was sad and lovely with bright things in it, bright eyes and a bright passionate mouth, but there was an excitement in her voice ... a promise that she had done gay, exciting things just a while since and that there were gay, exciting things hovering in the next hour" Gatsby 33).
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