This book gives light to the multiple artistic expressions of Great Gatsby-writer’s wife as modernist vanguard.

Known as an icon of the Jazz Age, a flamboyant socialite, and the mad wife of F. Scott, Zelda Fitzgerald has inspired studies of her life and work which focus on her earlier years, and on the myth of the glorious-but-doomed woman. As an unprecedented study of the totality Zelda Fitzgerald’s creative work, this book makes an important contribution to the history of women’s art with new perspectives on women and modernity, plagiarism, creative partnership, and the nature of mental illness.

Zelda Fitzgerald’s creative output was astonishing, considering the conditions under which she lived, and the brevity of her life: she wrote dozens of short stories, several journalistic pieces, a play, two novels, hundreds of letters, kept diaries and produced hundreds of artworks. Employing a new mode of literary analysis that draws upon critics, theorists, and historians to situate her work in its context, The Subversive Art of Zelda Fitzgerald rehabilitates the literary and artistic status of Zelda Fitzgerald by reassessing her life and writings in the light of archival sources. Such materials include medical and psychiatric documents; her unpublished novel; an artistic and spiritual diary; and over one hundred letters written from asylums.

While much of her writing can be read as a tactical response to her husband’s injunctions against her creativity, it can also be read as brilliant work in its own right.  Far from imitating Scott’s style, Zelda Fitzgerald’s artistic output is vibrantly alive and utterly her own.

Deborah Pike is a senior lecturer and discipline director of English Literature at the University of Notre Dame Australia, Sydney campus. She lectured in English language and literature at the University of Paris VII and at the Paris Institute of Political Studies, while also employed as editor at the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. She has presented papers and seminars in Australia, Europe, the US and the UK. Dr. Pike has published in the areas of cultural studies, postcolonial, and modernist literatures, in addition to a growing interest in wellbeing studies. She is co-editor of On Happiness: New Ideas for the Twenty-First Century and Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Playfrom Birth to Beyond.