The Paper Dolls of Zelda Fitzgerald

By Eleanor Lanahan

A beautifully designed, full-color collection of paper dolls created by Zelda Fitzgerald, lovingly compiled by her granddaughter, Eleanor Lanahan.

Born in Montgomery, Alabama, Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald has long been an American cultural icon. A Southern belle turned flapper, Zelda was talented in dance, painting, and writing but lived in the shadow of her writer husband F. Scott Fitzgerald’s success.

The golden couple of the Jazz Age, Zelda and her husband moved around—from hotels to rented villas to apartments in Paris—and Zelda always brought along her paints. Few people know she painted at all, and fewer still know she made paper dolls. But throughout her life, Zelda created dolls, whenever she could, in private. By design, paper dolls are delicate, fragile, and destined for destruction at the hands of children. Zelda’s dolls began as playthings for her daughter, Scottie, born in 1921. Fortunately, Zelda continued to make figures after Scottie outgrew them, first of their family and then of storybook characters—lavish, graceful, bold figures.

These unique characters were a portable troupe, a colorful paper caravan that travelled inside her luggage. Zelda chose subjects she relished: society figures of the French Court, or Red Riding Hood’s predatory wolf, as vivacious as the girl. Whether they are cardinals, kings, or bears, the dolls are fashionably attired in ball gowns, armor, and capes.

A gorgeous and unique keepsake and a perfect gift for book and art lovers, this delightful collection of Zelda’s paper dolls offers an intimate peek into the life of one of the Lost Generation’s most fascinating creative artists.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Scribner
• Release date: Nov 22, 2022
• ISBN: 9781982187200

Eleanor Lanahan

Eleanor Lanahan attended Sarah Lawrence College and the Rhode Island School of Design. After twenty years of commercial illustration and for children’s books under the married name Eleanor Hazard, she illustrated The Big Green Book by Madeleine Kunin and Marilyn Stout. As Eleanor Lanahan, she wrote the books Scottie, The Daughter of... and Zelda, An Illustrated Life, as well as animated the movies The Naked Hitch-Hiker and One Alcoholic to Another. Lanahan lives in Vermont.

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Cover: The Paper Dolls of Zelda Fitzgerald, by Eleanor Lanahan

The Paper Dolls of Zelda Fitzgerald

Eleanor Lanahan

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The Paper Dolls of Zelda Fitzgerald, by Eleanor Lanahan, ScribnerFor Zelda, fairy grandmother extraordinaire

1920

Scott and Zelda in the first year of their marriage

February 16, 1959

Scottie Fitzgerald Lanahan in the attic of her home in Washington, DC, showing Zelda’s paper dolls to her four children, clockwise from Samuel (standing), Eleanor (the author), Tim, and Cecilia, for a story in Life magazine.

Preface

For decades, Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald was known primarily as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s wife and highly quotable sidekick, the original Roaring Twenties flapper and model for many of her husband’s fictional heroines. With the women’s movement in the late 1960s came a resurgence of interest in Zelda’s own talents as a writer of fiction and as a dancer. But until recently, few people were aware of her artwork, although she produced more than one hundred cityscapes of the places where she lived, illustrations for fairy tales and biblical stories, and paintings of figures and flowers. For me, though—her granddaughter—the showstoppers were always her paper dolls.

There were no photographs of my grandparents around the house when I was growing up, but Scott and Zelda were an unspoken presence. Zelda’s cityscape paintings hung downstairs, and her fairy-tale illustrations in our bedrooms. She died only two months after I was born. In her last letter to my mother, she wrote: I long to meet the baby girl: is she fair or dark, of epic or lyric disposition? How I wish I had met her! I do, however, find consolation in knowing she was aware of my existence.

The first personal connection I made with my grandmother was when I discovered she had painted these vibrant paper dolls. At around the age of ten, I