“Challenging, full of energy and interesting, original ideas. Pike’s contention that Zelda Fitzgerald is a Modernist writer who makes a significant contribution to Modernist writing by women is supported by a great deal of well-researched, convincing, and illuminating evidence.”—Sally Cline, author of Zelda Fitzgerald: The Tragic Meticulously Researched Biography of the Jazz Age’s High Priestess
“An impressive, wide-ranging work. It does not simply use biography: it bases its readings and conclusions on a thorough knowledge of all Zelda’s work—painting, dance, nonfiction, and fiction—as well as all the personal controversies, and (probably most important) all the dense—and often ignored—unpublished materials in the Princeton archive.”—Linda Wagner-Martin, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, author of Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald: An American Woman’s Life
“Pike capably handles the wide variety of Zelda Fitzgerald’s work: letters, stories, a novel, unpublished work, a diary, and paintings. Indeed, Pike demonstrates a wide range of reading, not just about Zelda Fitzgerald but also F.Scott Fitzgerald, critical and psychoanalytic theory as well as comparable surrealist novels and other works.”—Jennifer Haytock, SUNY College at Brockport, author of The Middle Class in the Great Depression: Popular Women’s Novels of the 1930s
“Moving with admirable ease across a range of critical frameworks, Deborah Pike provides the first sustained—and long overdue—examination of Zelda Fitzgerald’s published and unpublished work: novels, short stories, a play, articles, diaries, and letters. In approaching Fitzgerald as a serious artist in her own right, and situating her writings in the nascent consumer culture from which they emerged, Pike makes a compelling case for a reconsideration of Fitzgerald in the annals of American literary history, especially modernism.”—Sarah Gleeson-White, University of Sydney, author of Strange Bodies: Gender and Identity in the Novels of Carson McCullers
“Pike’s contribution to the field is substantial and ambitious. ... it has provided new avenues to think about Fitzgerald—to read simultaneously the lines of privilege and marginalization that cross her life and work, to think about the political continuities across her oeuvre, to analyze discursive categories like seriousness, and to continue to make space for Fitzgerald’s writing in our cultural and critical memory.”—Modernism/Modernity
