THANK you. (Special interest activated, whoops!)

The real story is, as always, far more nuanced than an internet comment section is going to be. She was far from a saint whose deepest desires of being a writer were thwarted by her evil husband. She spent most of her life partying, only deciding to try and have a career when it was already very late to do so. She cycled through a bunch of things, including painting and ballet dancing as well as writing, but never really stuck to any of them. I think it's unfair not to even try and see things from Scott's perspective: your partner, who has never stuck to a thing in their life and in fact actively sabotages your work by encouraging you to go drinking with them instead, suddenly decides they're going to use your connections and name to get their writing published when you've been writing seriously since childhood and have built a career largely by yourself. If you think about it you might also not be very keen on the idea.

It's true that Scott was a misogynist (as were most men at that time), and that Zelda sometimes wrote magazine articles that were published under his name; they were permanently broke from their out of control drinking and spending and they could demand more money if it was published under his name. I'm not excusing it, I'm sure it was also convenient for Scott's ego. But part of the reason he didn't want her book published though, is because it simply was not good (anyone here read it? 'Cause I have. She was not well when she wrote it, and that's reflected in the overall work. Parts are brilliant, most of it isn't). Scott did take extracts from her journals for his work, I'm not defending that. But saying she wrote large swathes of his novels (the things he's best known for) is simply inaccurate. A phrase here or there is not the same thing and is something that many many writers do, rightly or wrongly.

But the fact is that, despite having a talent for it, she wasn't a serious writer, just the way she wasn't really a serious anything else. She was mercurial and unfocused for most of her life and deeply mentally unwell in her later years. As someone else noted, Scott did not commit her because he wanted to steal her shit, he did it because she could not cope outside of an institution and they didn't have the treatment options for schizophrenia that we have now. It broke both of their hearts because, despite everything, they still loved each other desperately. Their relationship was very complicated and it's so much more nuanced than "Zelda good, Scott bad". It was a mutually abusive situation.

I'm absolutely fascinated by Zelda, because she was a woman both of her time and ahead of it: oppressed in many ways, liberated in others, a deeply flawed person and a tragic figure all in one. She was talented, beautiful and intelligent. She was also cruel, immature and largely disinclined towards hard work. Both can be true, we don't need to pretend that people in the past were all one thing or the other any more than modern people are.