A frequently overlooked aspect of Zelda Fitzgerald’s life is her passion for ballet, which began when she was twenty-five. Photograph by CSU Archives / Everett

A fascination with Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s marriage ebbs and flows in our pop culture, and it is currently on the upswing, with shows such as “Z: The Beginning of Everything” and the new series “The Last Tycoon,” in which Zelda’s echo is faint and the viewer is left in the familiar position of wanting to know more about her life and her dynamism. A frequently overlooked aspect of Zelda is her passion for ballet. In the summer of 1925, ballet lessons at a studio in Paris became an outlet for her artistry, and swiftly led to an unsustainable fixation. Zelda was twenty-five, a mother and wife—she was five years into her marriage to Scott. Her commitment to dance quickly accelerated, and she decided to become a professional ballerina at the age of twenty-seven.

Having trained as a ballet dancer myself, I know that the physical demands of the art form are unforgiving. In a few years, Zelda had danced herself into an obsession, and mental illness erupted through the cracks of her physically exhausted body. In a recent conversation, Scott and Zelda’s granddaughter, Eleanor Lanahan, suggested that ballet seemed to give Zelda what she was seeking at the time—a mode of pure expression. It was a medium that wasn’t dominated by the great artists that were her social circle, where she might have felt easily overshadowed. “I’ll tell you about my mother,” Lanahan said of Zelda and Scott’s only child, Scottie Fitzgerald. “She felt her mother’s curse was that she had so much talent it was hard for her to focus on one.”

Dancing was an achievement that Zelda wanted completely for herself. In the July, 1929, issue of College Humor, the first of Zelda’s “Girls” stories was published, written with the intention of paying for her ballet lessons. “The Original Follies Girl” provides a satisfying glimpse into Zelda’s uncanny self-awareness. “She wore herself out with the struggle between her desire for physical perfection and her desire to use it,” Zelda wrote of her Girl. Later, she animated this mesmerizing period of her life in her only novel, “Save Me the Waltz,” published in 1932. It’s a deeply personal read, written while hospitalized in Phipps Clinic, in Baltimore, just after her second breakdown. We are shown the world of Zelda’s main character, Alabama, who begins taking ballet lessons and describes the pulling and twisting of her long legs at the barre.

Zelda’s infatuation with ballet can be traced to that summer, in 1925, when she began lessons in Paris with the great Russian ballerina Lubov Egorova. Afterward, travel kept the Fitzgeralds away from Paris until 1928. During that time, Zelda continued to train several days a week, in Philadelphia, while they rented a home in Delaware, but the discipline that drove her upon her return to France is remarkable. Egorova’s studio in Paris was a hive of the most talented dancers of the time. She had danced with the Imperial Russian Ballet and then with the Ballets Russes, under the famed Sergei Diaghilev. Each day, Zelda walked into a Degas scene: a studio filled with professional dancers who must have appeared to her as angels. One vision in particular was a ballerina called Lucienne. Scholars’ footnotes that accompany Zelda’s letters from 1930 identify Lucienne simply as “a ballerina at the studio.” It is more likely that this dancer is actually Lucienne Lamballe, of the Paris Opera Ballet. By 1924, Lamballe was a première danseuse, and she was a contemporary in age, only two years younger than Zelda. Lamballe took the professional class at the studio, and Egorova coached her privately for principal roles, common for prima ballerinas.

Zelda and Lucienne developed a friendship, and Lucienne appears several times in Scott’s ledger. In May, 1929, he simply recorded, “Lucien again,” as if she were a regular in the Fitzgeralds’ lives. After class, Zelda and Lucienne went to cafés and backstage at the Paris Opera theatre, but their relationship was susceptible to the strain and pressure of studio life. Zelda began to lose touch with her life at home, with her daughter, Scottie, and with Scott, who was drinking wildly as he struggled to focus on his next novel. Zelda’s dedication to her ballet technique became consuming.

It is not possible to verify how technically perfect Zelda’s dancing was. However, ballet cares little for personal feelings, and Egorova would not have continued to encourage Zelda’s intense training if her ability had no merit. Photographs from 1928 and 1929 show Zelda’s body changing. Noticeably thinner, her ankles were delicate and the arches of her feet high. Anne Margaret Daniel, the editor of “I’d Die for You: And Other Lost Stories,” a collection of previously unpublished or uncollected pieces by Fitzgerald, beautifully acknowledged this transformation as a manifestation of Zelda’s desire to literally, physically make something of herself. “I don’t think it had to be ballet, but ballet is what came to pass, and ballet is what she chose. It’s what she’s fixed upon. I think it’s indisputable that she was an accomplished dancer and that she was praised for her dancing as a young woman,” Daniel said. Perhaps, as an adult who was at a loss for inspiration, Zelda was looking to her youth.

There was a moment when Zelda’s efforts could have been entirely rewarded. Julia Sedova, a former dancer with the Imperial Russian Ballet and the ballet mistress of the San Carlo Opera dance company, wrote Zelda a letter, in French, dated September 23, 1929. In it, she offered Zelda the opportunity to perform in the Teatro di San Carlo’s production of the opera “Aida,” to dance “advantageous solos,” and, most incredibly, to dance for the full season with a monthly salary. Zelda did not go to Naples. (The letter is now stored at the Princeton University Library.)

Zelda’s decision not to go could perhaps be explained by her collapsing mental state at the time. She had begun to act desultory at home with Scott and friends. Her world was unravelling, and she exhibited mood swings that would have her enjoying parties at one moment and frantically fretting about leaving at the next. There were arguments with Lucienne, and Egorova began to see her as unhinged. In the spring of 1930, Zelda checked into Malmaison, a clinic near Paris, but she left shortly thereafter, for more dance lessons. Scott employed a “ballet psychoanalyst” (according to his ledger), to Zelda’s displeasure. Eventually, the strain became overwhelming, and she was admitted to Clinique Valmont, in Switzerland, and then to Prangins Clinic, near Geneva, on June 5, 1930. “I don’t want to call it a manifestation or a symptom,” Daniel commented of Zelda’s breakdown and its parallels to her ballet training. “I think that’s the wrong way of looking at it, I think it is a case of having to look at the mind and the body together.”

Throughout Zelda’s life, Scott supported her and desperately wanted to help her maintain good health. While Zelda was in treatment, Scott wrote to Egorova, asking her to evaluate Zelda’s dance abilities; Egorova replied that Zelda could go on to professional endeavors, but that, because of her late start, she could never be a first-rate ballerina. Scott understood this, and, in a particularly preachy letter to Zelda, in 1932, he attributed his own success, and Lucienne’s, to their “long desperate heart-destroying professional training beginning when we ie Lucienne + I were seven, probably.” Zelda did cultivate her other talents, especially her painting. She continually battled the “sense of inertia that hovers over my life” with a devout commitment to her own identity and creativity. But she never forgot her passion for ballet, and, in January, 1940, less than a year before Scott died, she wrote to him: “Scottie sent me a program of the Ballet Russe. This will never cease pulling at my heart-strings: not that I wish it would.”