Ex-Wife by Ursula Parrott

Ex-Wife by Ursula Parrott

published 1929

 

 "...I see you’ve brought down your bright red dress.” I had not worn it yet—had bought it because the colour was heavenly. But it was, a bit obviously, a dress one wore to be stared at in. Tight across the hips, and no back.

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)

screengrabs from the film The Divorcee

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.

Une robe de Madeleine Vionnet - NYPL Digital Collections