“This is the end. Why don’t I cry or something?” thinks the heroine of this novel. It’s the beginning of the book but the end of her marriage, and her feelings are mixed. “I hoped I looked devastated; I hoped I looked lovely” – though she is sitting alone, with no one to see.
Ex-Wife, Ursula Parrott’s first novel, was published in the US in 1929, but never in Britain until now. The book was put out anonymously, not for fear of scandal but as a marketing gimmick – though it’s easy to see that it could have been controversial, with its frank depictions of abortion and casual sex. (“Chastity, really, went out when birth control came in,” says one character.)
Certainly our narrator, advertising executive Patricia, leaves no subject untouched: she has a lot to offload and she is saying it all. It’s 1925 and her husband, Peter, has left her after she admitted sleeping with his best friend; now Patricia places herself firmly in the category of ex-wife, defining herself by what she lacks. As her friend Lucia points out: “An ex-wife is a woman with a crick in her neck from looking back over her shoulder at her matrimony.”
Feeling herself to blame, Patricia gives herself six months to win Peter back, and seems undeterred by the horrible violence he inflicts on her as they argue, even as she acknowledges that it “did something rather permanent to my soul”. There are further complications: her chipper front conceals mourning for her baby boy who died, giving us an exceptionally affecting scene where she asks a friend what two-year-old children – the age her son would have been – talk about.
Her mixed feelings continue. She gets pregnant again, has an abortion, and then sleeps with the doctor who carried it out. She does and doesn’t want to move on from Peter. She wants to be a modern woman but hankers after the certainties of the sexist past. “If the next generation of women have any sense, they’ll dynamite the statue of [women’s rights activist] Susan B Anthony and start a crusade for the revival of chivalry.” At times Patricia reads like a precursor to Bridget Jones, or an American rendering of German novelist Irmgard Keun’s young women (Gilgi, One of Us or The Artificial Silk Girl) trying to make a life on their own terms.
Ex-Wife is funny, lively and sometimes harrowing, engaging with its own contemporary culture in a way novels rarely do – Patricia reads Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Galsworthy – and covering work life as well as love life. (When Patricia’s manager has a “thorough nervous breakdown” she “inherited his problems and his secretary”.) And the novel’s author is just as interesting as its narrator. Ursula Parrott led a busy life; she turned to writing potboilers after the huge success of Ex-Wife, and – according to her son – earned around $700,000 between 1930 and 1945 (equivalent to at least $12m today). But she liked to spend and give it away, and spent the last five years of her life in hiding from her creditors. She died from cancer in 1957, aged 58, in a charity ward, her books forgotten. Now, a century on from her first success, it’s cause for celebration that she can be read once more.
• Ex-Wife is published by Faber Editions (£9.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
