Save Me The Waltz

the long version

Zelda Fitzgerald’s only novel Save Me The Waltz opens during the First World War. Alabama Beggs is a Southern belle who makes her début into adulthood with wild parties, dancing and drinking, and flirting with the young officers posted to her home town. When the artist Lieutenant David Knight arrives to join her line of suitors, Alabama marries him. Their life in New York, Paris and the South of France closely mirrors the Fitzgeralds’ own life and their prominent socialising in the 1920s and 1930s as part of what was later called the Lost Generation. Like Zelda, Alabama became passionate about dance. She attends ballet class in Paris every day. She refuses to accept that she might not become the great dancer that she ardently longs to be, and this threatens her mental health and her marriage. Erin E Templeton’s introduction to Zelda Fitzgerald’s finest literary work shows how these struggles to become a dancer were the result of Zelda’s need to have a life of her own rather than living in her husband’s shadow.