The Flapper Girl Muses

For Jazz Age girls Zelda Fitzgerald, Vivienne Eliot and Lucia Joyce, having it all was not enough.

From a piece in the Telegraph...

Interest in the ”flapper girl“ is once again high, with Baz Luhrmann's forthcoming film remake of The Great Gatsby and new editions of Fitzgerald's short story collection Tales of the Jazz Age published by Cambridge University Press next week and by Oxford University Press in June. 

Vivienne Eliot, the young wife of T S Eliot, was also a flapper, or ”char-flapper“ as he liked to call her when they met in 1915. And across the Channel, Lucia Joyce, dancing exuberantly through the 1920s, was another. The daughter of James Joyce, she was his femme inspiratrice, according to Carl Jung; Vivienne Eliot was, according to Virginia Woolf, ”the true inspiration“ of her husband. 

These three young women, the female embodiments of the new partying age, would each end their lives in mental hospitals. Their tragic ends are obscured by our shiny rediscovery of the flapper today – possibly because they posit such uncomfortable questions. The muse is traditionally a silent, passive figure; a beautiful woman whose beauty alone is enough to inspire artists. But what made young women of such an exciting new age want to take on this silent, passive role? Did they renew it or rebel against it? And did their rebellion lead to their madness?