Review by

Ex-Wife

Brilliantly pithy observations of 1920’s American womanhood

It’s the Roaring Twenties and Patricia is living the Jazz Age dream in New York. Hers is a cosmopolitan life of smoky nightclubs and cocktail parties, with the added bonus of a sexually liberated husband. But at the age of just twenty-four, Patricia finds herself unglamorously dumped, after her ‘theoretically modern’ husband, Peter leaves her. Apparently, any agreed sexual freedoms had applied only to him, and so, when Patricia reveals an amorous liaison, she is spurned and forced to build a new life as a not-so-merry divorcée. Labelled scandalous and sensational upon publication in 1929, Ex-Wife by Ursula Parrott portrays a generation eager for a permissive society but mired in double standards.

The novel opens with Patricia looking back on the sequence of events that ended her marriage, and her surprise that for all the couple’s discussions about sexual adventure, in the end, Peter had ‘gone conventional’. Not that he accepts that, declaring variously that he’s gone off her because she’s lost her looks or is too temperamental. Desperate to understand, Patricia theorises and despairs, until the day former acquaintance and fellow ex-wife, Lucia, breezes back into her life.

Fun-loving, whip-smart, and gorgeous, Lucia claims Patricia as a kindred woman-about-town and invites her to share her duplex apartment and city adventures. ‘You’ve got all of New York to console you for Peter,’ she declares, and Patricia takes the plunge.

Parrott’s sparky, perceptive bestseller caused some controversy in its day, for its frank depiction of a divorced woman trying to shake off the moral pronouncements of the previous generation. In thrall to martini-quaffing and cigarettes, Patricia parties her way around Manhattan, aided by a career in advertising that funds her Chanel dresses and endless taxi fares. Amusing herself with a string of men she calls ‘the transients’, Patricia seems to have it all. And yet she remains conflicted. Being a single, modern woman isn’t what she’d hoped for. Misogyny and hypocrisy are all-pervasive, along with predatory men (even a doctor who arranges an abortion for her can’t resist a shot at seduction).

Thank God then for the magnificent Lucia. In a novel that is strong on female friendship, Lucia is Patricia’s wingwoman, confidante and counsellor. A few years older, and further along the divorcée path, she’s sympathetic, worldly wise, and given to brilliantly pithy observations of 1920’s American womanhood.

The pair spend many hours analysing their situation; there is something hollow and precarious at the heart of it. Lucia has some theories on this, one of them being her ‘fifteen gold pieces’ 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.’

Social mores have certainly shifted, but once a woman’s currency of youth and beauty is spent, what status or security is she left with? Patricia is torn between rebellion and pragmatism.

Blessed with an insightful foreword by Monica Heisey, Ex-Wife makes a bold and compelling addition to Faber Editions revival of radical reads.

Ex-Wife by Ursula Parrott is published by Faber and Faber, 304 pages.