She was exciting and discomfiting and morally questionable she was confusing to her suitors, some of whom found her at once repellant and irresistible. She spent her days chasing a career, while her nights were a boozy smear of restaurants, speakeasies, and amorous encounters. when the stigma of divorce was fading, and divorce rates were rising accordingly, “Ex-Wife” presented readers and critics with a new woman, one who was pursuing new vocational, economic, and romantic freedoms. In the course of the next ten years, Parrott, as a best-selling novelist and in-demand writer for movies and magazines, became a multimillionaire and attained a Hollywood-adjacent literary fame comparable to that of Nora Ephron in the nineteen-eighties.Īt a time in the U.S.

“Ex-Wife” was adapted into the hit movie “The Divorcee,” which won Norma Shearer the lead-actress Oscar. (“Fiction or confession?” a headline asked.) In October, 1929, amid the stock-market crash that precipitated the Great Depression, Parrott received her first royalty check, for the modern-day equivalent of almost three hundred thousand dollars. No longer tantalizing readers by shrouding Parrott’s identity in mystery, the marketers of “Ex-Wife” now strived to make the attractive young author synonymous with her creation, insinuating that her novel was a barely veiled memoir. The Hearst tabloid the Daily Mirror serialized the novel and teased “the most talked about story of the day” with a full-page ad prominently featuring Parrott’s name and pixie-cut likeness. 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. In the summer of 1929, a provocative New York novel titled “ Ex-Wife” arrived in bookstores, quickly selling out its first printing.

Frome edith wharton novel