When I saw The Ex-Wife by Ursula Parrott (1929) in my local charity bookshop I snapped it up, remembering JacquiWine’s review. Faber Editions are always reliable too, and it’s great that they’ve brought this back into print (as have McNally in the US.) It evokes a young woman navigating independence during Jazz Age New York so vividly.
Pat is twenty-four when her marriage to Pete falls apart, with extra-marital dalliances on both sides, aided by alcohol and parties.
“In the three weeks we had been to six parties, three first nights, five speakeasies, four night clubs, two operas, and a concert”
These young people are so inexperienced and naïve, and the collapse of their marriage seems inevitable as neither have the first clue how to save it:
“I thought: “I will try to make it up to Pete by being good tempered always, and looking as pretty as possible, and following all his stories, and not being extravagant anymore.” I felt very grown up.”
From my twenty-first century view I wouldn’t want to save a marriage to someone who pushed me through a plate-glass door because he wasn’t happy about the pregnancy he was equally responsible for, but Pat is very attached to her husband and wants him back.
She moves in with her friend Lucia, five years older and also divorced, who tries to persuade Pat of the advantages of their situation:
“‘We are free. Applesauce! Free to pay our own rent, and buy our own clothes, and put up with the eccentricities of three to eight men who have authority over us in business, instead of having to please just one husband.’”
We follow Pat as she navigates single life as woman in the Roaring Twenties: working, socialising, happy and unhappy. She is attractive and young, and men are interested in her. Parrott has some wonderful turns of phrase and a way of crafting sentences that is so arresting.
“Hoping sometime to wake and find I had slept beside a lover and friend, I slept to wake beside a stranger exigent, triumphant, or exasperated, or perhaps as bored and polite as I.”
Pat enjoys parties and manages a successful career. She also has genuine friends both male and female, but there is an undercurrent of sadness with some of her male friends who are older than she is, and so fought in the war.
“Kenneth looked as if he would understand about Peter, and the men one kissed cure one of the memory of Peter, and the little hope one cherished about Peter, in spite of judgement and the common sense and the well-meant advice of one’s friends.”
Pat is a fashion copywriter who enjoys spending money and there are some gorgeous descriptions of clothes throughout The Ex-Wife. New York is obviously another love, and this passage made me wonder if it inspired the opening scene of Woody Allen’s Manhattan:
“Sam gave Lucia an Orthophonic Phonograph for a birthday present. Gershwin’s ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ was almost the only record we ever played on it. We turned that on, about once an hour when we were at home.
‘That tune matches New York,’ Lucia said. ‘The New York we know. It has gaiety and colour and irrelevancy and futility and glamour as beautifully blended as the ingredients in crepes suzette.’
I said, ‘It makes me think of skyscrapers and Harlem and liners sailing and newsboys calling extras.’
‘It makes me think I’m twenty years old and on the way to owning the city,’ Lucia said. ‘Start it over again, will you?’”
Apparently the novel was a scandalous sensation on first appearance and had to be published anonymously. There is much in it that feels very modern and I was surprised that a 1929 novel was so open in discussions of sex, domestic violence and abortions. The difference in grief responses from Pat and Pete regarding their young child felt very real and heartbreaking, despite Parrott not overly exploring it.
There are also some pithy observations about what increased freedom for women at this time really means:
“The principal thing that relieving women from the dullness of domesticity did, was to relieve men from any necessity of offering stability in return for love, fidelity and so on.”
Yet really what makes The Ex-Wife still so readable after nearly a century is the closely-observed characterisation of Pat. She is so endearing: young in many ways, older in others. She is frank about her loneliness and vulnerabilities; unapologetic about her enjoyment of bars, dancing and shopping. She is wise and naïve and she really grows throughout The Ex-Wife.
“Enclose with that decree a complete assortment of young illusions, a beatific confidence, an entertaining lack of common sense, and an innocent expression—and I shall be—just as if I had never married.”
To end, a scene from the film adaptation made just a year later, which won Norma Shearer an Oscar:
madame bibi lophile recommends 