When Ursula Parrott’s “Ex-Wife” was published, in 1929, the stigma of divorce was fading in the U.S. The novel presented readers and critics with a new woman, one who was pursuing new vocational, economic, and romantic freedoms.
” arrived in bookstores, quickly selling out its first printing. Walter Winchell, the gossip columnist and radio host, called it a “sensational book about husbands and sex.” It was published anonymously—a not uncommon marketing gimmick of the time—but the author was soon outed in Winchell’s newspaper column as Ursula Parrott, a thirty-year-old first-time novelist, the daughter of a respected Boston physician, a Radcliffe graduate, a single mother of a young son, and a verified ex-wife.
“All this,” in short, was the abrupt change in sexual and marital mores that cleaved Parrott’s Manhattan society from that of Edith Wharton’s age. Husbands could certainly run around on their wives then, but they were expected to do so with genteel discretion, while keeping their marriages intact. Divorce and desertion were near-unthinkable.
What the quasi-liberated, cosmopolitan woman of “Ex-Wife” has won above all, Parrott believed, is the freedom to be harmed. She presents her strongest evidence in the book’s most scandalous episode: in its frank depiction of Patricia’s abortion. Parrott was ahead of her time here—Dorothy Parker’s short story “Lady with a Lamp” would not appear for three more years.
Perhaps the most obvious distinction between Parrott and her protagonist is that Parrott raised a son, Marc, to adulthood. Marc, a schoolteacher and librarian who died in 1988, is given the last word in the McNally edition of “Ex-Wife,” in the form of a mordant but affectionate afterword. He directs the reader to a 1927cover that he feels captures his mother’s essence: “Pallas Athena as a Fitzgerald-era flapper.
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