Marina Scholtz . Ex-Wife , Ursula Parrott, Faber Editions, 2024, 252 pages, £9.99 .
. This might be the reissued book of the summer, but its author’s Wikipedia page is one for the ages. Like every serious party girl Ursula Parrott’s ‘Personal Life’ section is long, varied and includes multiple arrests.
She was married four times, had innumerable affairs and a secret child. She was an alcoholic given to profligate spending. Her life and work became so synonymous with a total lack of morality that the US Army requested that no books by Parrott be donated to the troops in 1939.
Ex-Wife was initially published anonymously in 1929. It quickly topped bestseller lists alongside Hemingway’s Farewell to Arms and Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front. It is a far more entertaining read than either, and Faber have repackaged it as holiday reading for the thinking woman.
Its frank discussion of sexual mores and other excesses in prohibition era New York meant that its publication caused widespread scandal and moral outrage. When a gossip column finally revealed Ursula Parrott as the author, she never managed, nor tried to, dodge the ensuing notoriety. Much was made of whether this was a confession or a novel – it was almost a century before it became boring to ask female novelists that question.
Ex-Wife tells the story of Patricia, a reluctant twenty-four year old divorcée, as she morphs from a diligent housewife into a promiscuous flapper. Parrott’s life certainly resembled that of her heroine. Like Parrott, Patricia is beautiful, writes advertising copy, has affairs, drinks too much and has a child her husband does not want.
Readers of Ex-Wife will be struck by how frankly it describes abortion, contraception, infant mortality, domestic violence and female friendship. Ex-Wife tackles much of the same subject matter as that of other overlooked twentieth century ‘women’s writing’, but it does so early. It is certainly surprising to read a novel from 1929 that contains the phrase, ‘women enters room preceded by diaphragm’.
This is the chief joy of successfully reissued books – they can shift our sense of their time. Originally published during an awkward phase between dwindling Victorian morality and the advent of the sexual revolution proper, Ex-Wife attempts a total reversal of the nineteenth century marriage plot. It begins with the end of a marriage.
Patricia’s husband has just left her; both have had affairs, she blithely forgives his, but he cannot forgive hers. He wants a divorce and she will not give it to him. This is not an empowerment narrative, the heroine does not want emancipation, but she happens to have it.
Patricia moves in with Lucia, a fellow ex-wife who introduces her to speakeasies, Harlem and casual sex. The novel is at its most delightful when the two of them are listening to Gershwin and putting the world to rights. The post break-up experiences of these two flappers feel startlingly universal in that they involve new clothes and bad decisions.
Patricia and Peter continue to sleep together occasionally, and a particularly heartbreaking one-night stand, ending with her husband unceremoniously kicking her out of bed, finally prompts Patricia to divorce him. The negotiations that precede this take up much of the action of the novel. When they are finally divorced the reader feels a profound relief that provides a similar sense of structural satisfaction that marriage does in Austen.
But for all its hedonism and the scandal of its reception, Ex-Wife also shares a sense of moral crisis and triumph with the nineteenth century novel. After taking on a string of indifferent partners Patricia eventually falls in love again, with a man called Noel who is so sexy that he could only have been written by a loose woman. Ultimately, Patricia renounces him and returns him to his wife, reflecting that, ‘I never tried it before.
.. but maybe the only satisfaction in anything, in the end, is the consciousness of having behaved well’.
This sacrifice may be delivered in the one liner wisecracks of a screwball heroine, but it has the heartbreaking force of Darcy’s sea change between proposals one and two, or one of Dorothea’s renunciations. One of the other great joys of Ex-Wife is the comfort Patricia draws from clothes and getting dressed. She reflects on her one-night stands and her office job, ‘They were not real.
Neither was the office. Clothes were real.’ For Patricia, clothes are a measurable and quantifiable pleasure in a life that is never fully within her control.
She runs into Peter’s new lover on Fifth Avenue and instantly compares outfits, ‘mine was a copy of a recent Vionnet, and hers of an early Spring Chanel’. She is able to understand, however painfully, that her ex-husband has taken up with a woman who dresses much like herself, and that she is replaceable. Patricia’s professional life is also immersed in clothes – she is head of copy at a department store and is forever trading advertising space for fur coats.
Chanel and Vionnet are a currency she grasps and deals in, and Ex-Wife joins Nabokov’s King, Queen, Knave as one of the great descriptions of the inner workings of a department store and its contents. Parrott’s commercial nous makes Ex-Wife compulsively readable. Like Patricia, Ursula Parrott was a shopper who wrote copy.
Ex-Wife made her a fortune, but she had expensive taste. She spent the thirties and early forties churning out romantic things for women’s magazines, selling options to Hollywood and exhausting her lines of credit. Like Fitzgerald (there was a rumoured affair) she commanded and spent sums of money which contemporary writers can only dream of.
Much writing on Ex-Wife positions Parrott between Edith Wharton and Jean Rhys. This places her in a tradition of female authors who happen to be beautiful writing about their looks with a frank awareness of them. The House of Mirth , Good Morning Midnight and Ex-Wife all feature beautiful passages where the heroines gaze at themselves in the mirror.
But this is never vanity exactly – it is an academic and an economic appraisal. Patricia looks in the mirror and describes herself in the third person, ‘around her eyes, there were faint shadows, that would be lines in ten years’. Beauty is finite, and Parrott’s ex-wives chart it like the Dow Jones.
Lucia is explicit about this: Every attractive woman has fifteen gold pieces to spend [...
] one for each year between the time she is twenty and the time she is thirty-five. She may squander the first ten or twelve if she likes, but she damn well should invest the rest of them in something safe for her middle age. Ultimately, both women remarry.
Patricia gives up the love of her life and marries a nice man who gives her an ermine wrap as a wedding present. She escapes the destitute fate of Lily Bart in House of Mirth , Sasha Jensen in Good Morning Midnight and that of her author. In the end, Parrott’s flagrant spending and alcoholism caught up with her; she died penniless and under a false name.
There was a still a warrant out for her arrest, and she had been lying about her age for decades. Not everything should be reissued. A judicious editor should introduce readers to books whose re-emergence uncovers a new understanding of the literary landscape.
For a book to be a truly good reissue it should seem outrageous and unjust that it fell out of print in the first place, and Ex-Wife is exactly that. In the 1970s Virago ushered in a golden era of reprinted forgotten works by female authors, and it is heartening to see a return to this. Faber Editions has been at the forefront of this trend and has reissued authors such as Rachel Ingalls, Brigid Brophy and Jean Stafford.
But what is notable about current reissuing is just how commercially successful it can be. The enduring popularity which previously lesser-known authors, like Eve Babitz, have experienced proves that lost voices are a serious market. Even men can be successfully reissued, though they seldom fall as violently out of sight, mind and print as female authors do.
Ex-Wife was initially sold as semi-pornographic trash in a paper wrapper, but Faber have given it the kind of campaign usually reserved for new literary fiction. There is merchandise (a baseball cap) and a bright cover with a lipstick on it. Genre is an interesting question in reissuing, if something was low brow upon initial publication, can it morph into literary fiction in the interim? Recent successes have included Kay Dick’s dystopian masterpiece They, and The Glass Pearls by Emeric Pressburger, a very unusual sixties noir.
A New Yorker review compares Parrott to Fitzgerald and Rhys and claims she falls short – who cares? If we never read anything as good as Rhys there would be nothing to do on holiday. This is the strength of Faber Editions’ approach to reissues – it isn’t afraid of genre. Ex-Wife is their answer to the beach read.
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Marina Scholtz is a writer and bookseller who lives in London. She can be found making TikToks on out of print books @oopsarchive. To discover more content exclusive to our print and digital editions, subscribe here to receive a copy of The London Magazine to your door every two months, while also enjoying full access to our extensive digital archive of essays, literary journalism, fiction and poetry.
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