Ex-Wife by Ursula Parrott
published 1929
I’ve recently been covering the Agatha Christie novel
The Seven Dials Mystery
Christie
and Seven Dials: 2026 version and 1920s clothes
--and here we have another novel, from the same year, by a
female author, about a young woman gadding about. It’s set in New York rather than
London, and has no element of crime. And in every way it couldn’t be more
different.
It’s a startling and unusual book, and was a bestseller in
its day – it was softened up when turned into a film, the Divorcee, which won an Oscar for the
lead actress. (Norma Shearer, who turns up from time to time here eg
More Hats - for matrons and garden parties)
Ex-Wife is funny and entertaining and full of fabulous clothes, but is also tough and shocking and unnerving. It follows a few years in the life of Patricia: she got married to Pete when they were both quite young, but the marriage has gone bad. She tries to rescue it, but gets nowhere.
So she ends up sharing a (very fancy-sounding) flat with
another divorced woman in Manhattan, and the book follows what happens to her
as she tries to pursue her career in copy-writing/advertising, and wonders if
she wants to meet someone else. She has a lot of male friends, mostly platonic,
and she and her circle drink a lot and go out and about. Having sex isn’t seen
as that big a deal, although there are still strong double standards, and to
our modern eyes the attitude to rape and violence is startling. There is an
abortion in the middle of all this.
Eventually she does find someone new, but this is not going
to be an easy path for quite complex and unusual reasons. The way it pans out
was very unexpected.
Not everyone approves of Patricia:
…she began to be definitely
rude to me. She was always objecting to the amount of lipstick I used, or the
lowness of my décolletage, or the shortness of my skirts. It irritated me
somewhat, but I was too busy to bother.
She loves her clothes:
I had plenty of washable suede
gloves, that Nora [the maid] kept beautifully fresh. Silly gay jewelry, to wear
a month and throw away. But it must carry out the ensemble idea, meanwhile. A
black silk coat, that was not just a black silk coat. A black and white Patou
frock. Hats and hats and hats—because I loved hats.
This is her meeting a rival in love:
I could not bear to meet her
in anything but the best-looking clothes I owned. Judith did wear clothes well.
And I considered what else I had on, and compared it as to chic with Judith’s
clothes (it was all right, both had dresses of imported prints, but mine was a
copy of a recent Vionnet, and hers of an early Spring Chanel—my wide black
Milan hat was as fine a straw as hers),
Someone offers her recompense to sleep with him – she uses
the euphemism ‘staying with him’ throughout the book.
She refuses -
The only thing I have left to cherish is my amateur standing.
Women holding onto this have popped up in posts such as this one (convention sweeties in NY) and this one (Noel Streatfeild, with links to Dodie Smith and Louise Brooks…)
And she is given this advice: “did you ever hear of the fifteen gold pieces? It’s a philosophy…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.”
There’s a moment where she is saying goodbye to a friend
who is getting married:
She smiled at us, and walked
out alone, between the rows of tables, a slender, red-haired girl, in a
yellow-flowered dress. I thought, “There goes my dearest friend.” I thought, “I
wonder what Lucia thinks about, really.” I thought, “I shall miss her acutely.”
Which I certainly recognized as a thing – that moment when
you know someone will still be your friend, but you are no longer two young
women heading into the world together.
The writer that Ursula Parrott did remind me of, was DorothyParker – the same cynicism and lightness hiding something deeper. I usually don't go in for this kind of comparison, but if pushed would say Ex-Wife is like F Scott Fitzgerald re-written by Dorothy Parker.
Here is Patricia with a woman from out-of-town, suggesting they visit a speakeasy:
“I know a nice one, on
Fifty-Second Street, where women without escorts are not conspicuous.”
“Oh, could we go to a
speakeasy?” she said. “…I have never seen a speakeasy.”
“That’s wonderful,” I said. “I
have wasted my youth in so many of them.”
We went to Fifty-Second
Street. Beatrice was stirred by the fact that she could put her
foot on a brass rail at the bar. She had read about brass rails but never seen
one.
I love these details, which someone writing a historical
novel would be unlikely to get right.
This is an unusual and memorable book – at times difficult reading, but mostly sliding down like a sorbet. It was out of print for a long time: a good thing it has been revived.
The author led what can only be called a rackety life,
running through men, friends and money, and died penniless in her 50s. Her son
wrote an afterword to the edition I read, and he understandably took a very
cool view of her. She was not a great mother. But he said the Vogue cover above (second picture down), from 1927, is how he thinks his mother looked at that time.
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