Had Enough Lanterns? Here’s a Parasol for a Change…and Zelda Fitzgerald Thinking About Running Away to China

Not sure there are enough parasols, even if there are too many lanterns these days, on book covers….R. Clifton Spargo’s Beautiful Fools: the Last Affair of Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald has a lovely Chinoiserie parasol on the cover. Of course Chinese parasols were a great delight of the Jazz Age, but Zelda did have an interest in China it seems. Though overshadowed by her husband, Zelda was also a writer and one of her short stories The Girl With Talent (or sometimes The Girl Who Had Some Talent) did feature a flapper dancer in 1920s New York who is offered a career chance of a lifetime but opts instead to elope with her lover to China. The story is a tad tricky to find these days – it appeared in the rather obscure (now at least) College Humor in April 1930. I believe it is in some of the out-of-print collections of Zelda’s shorter fiction.

1929/1930 were of course difficult years for Zelda – in 1930 she was admitted to a sanatorium in Maryland diagnosed bipolar and her marriage was failing. Running away to China must have seemed like a good idea at the time one can imagine.