Ursula Parrott

Ursula Parrott (March 26, 1899 – September 1957), was a prolific modern novelist, screenwriter, and short story writer whose sensational first novel, Ex-Wife (1929), was a Jazz Age best seller. Adapted for film as The Divorcee, it starred Norma Shearer. Exploring divorce, abortion, infidelity, changing ideas about marriage, and the disastrous effects of the new morality on women, Ex-Wife created a scandal because of its frank depiction of young working women in a New York City drenched in cocktails and Scotch. From 1930 to 1936, Parrott sold the rights to eight novels and stories that were made into films.

During her lifetime, her works fell into obscurity, only to be revived when Ex-Wife was republished in 1988 and 2023 (paperback), garnering considerable attention in the New York Times, The New Yorker, the Paris Review and other prestigious publications. Amy Helmes and Kim Askew of the “Lost Ladies of Lit Podcast” linked the book favorably to Mary McCarthy’s “The Group,” Rona Jaffe’s “The Best of Everything” and even F. Scott Fitzgerald’s masterworks “The Great Gatsby” and Tender Is The Night.
The title of author Lyz Lenz’s 2003 nonfiction divorce memoir, “This American Ex-Wife: How I Left My Marriage and Started My Life,” is an homage to Ex-Wife. Her podcast “Remembering the Original-Ex-Wife” honors Parrott for chronicling the devastating consequences of divorce for women.
“Ursula Parrott’s cult Jazz Age novel Ex-Wife is more resonant than ever,” says critic Alissa Bennett,. She recommends it to admirers of Edith Wharton and Jean Rhys. “Told with a polished Jazz Age dandyism, Ex-Wife resonates at a subtle but unmissable emotional frequency, which is what makes it feel so contemporary.”