The Iceberg: A story by Zelda Fitzgerald

In 1918, Zelda Sayre, later Zelda Fitzgerald, won a prize for this story, which she published in the Sidney Lanier High School Literary Journal. She was seventeen or eighteen years old when she wrote it; she would soon meet F. Scott Fitzgerald, her escape hatch from the restrictive world of Montgomery, Alabama, into a tumultuous life of literary striving. The story was recently unearthed, and the Fitzgerald estate was surprised to learn of its existence. The heroine of “The Iceberg” is Cornelia, a plucky young woman from an aristocratic Southern family, with no marriage prospects, who decides to seek her destiny at business college. She impresses a rich man with her dexterous typing, and, without telling her family, she marries him. When Zelda Fitzgerald’s granddaughter Eleanor Lanahan read the story, she said, “Who knew Zelda wrote stories before Scott entered her life? Who knew she’d give a working girl the happiest of destinies? This is a charming morality tale of sorts. Ironically, Cornelia’s ending up with a rich husband is her ultimate success. This is truly a fascinating story—about Zelda, the South, and women’s expectations in 1917 or so.” The tone is lighthearted, winking, and ironic, and the story seems to presage some of the tensions in Zelda's own life: between independence and entanglement with a man, the twinned and, sometimes, conflicting desires to write and to be admired, and the pressures of a search for the right kind of self-expression.