How do marketing departments decide when to pitch a reissued novel as a ‘forgotten classic’? Does it need to have been greeted with acclaim the first time round before dropping out of view, or is it okay to define it as such even if it attracted little attention on first appearance, sitting around fretfully in second-hand bookshops and waiting for an excitable young agent to hold it to the light and discover that it has the weight and feel of a classic?

Kay Dick’s They (‘the radical dystopian classic, lost for forty years’) falls into the second category. Initially, critics were dismissive or indifferent, sales were bad and the novel disappeared almost before anyone had noticed it was there. Caroline Blackwood’s The Fate of Mary Rose, soon to be reissued by Virago, falls into the first. Widely and favourably reviewed, it was published in several languages before going out of print. Ursula Parrott’s 1929 novel Ex-Wife (‘a forgotten classic … darkly funny’) is a more complicated case – not so much a once-acclaimed book searching for a new generation of readers as a racy bestseller looking for a home in the literary fiction section.

The novel, an account of a very young woman’s post-divorce life in New York, was initially published anonymously in order to draw attention to the salacious nature of its contents. This was a common enough marketing tactic at the time, but the material really was scandalous. The heroine, Patricia, has an abortion in the opening chapters, has sex with dozens of men, contemplates whether or not to sleep with a particularly feral specimen in order to get her hands on a chest of drawers she admires, and is incredibly drunk at least half the time. The first print run of the book sold out immediately, and after Parrott’s identity was revealed in the tabloids, the marketing team worked to conflate her identity with Patricia’s, suggesting that Ex-Wife be regarded as confession rather than fiction. 

The book was adapted into a film, The Divorcee, starring Norma Shearer, who won an Oscar playing the title character. Over the next ten years, Parrott became very famous and very rich. She wrote for filmmakers and magazines, published dozens of novels and short stories and became a tabloid fixture, a beautifully dressed woman with an angelic face and a poodle named Ex-Wife. Somewhere along the line, the press turned on her, writing about her abortions and alcoholism, her increasingly unsuitable husbands (she married four times) and her multiple arrests for things like ‘impairing the loyalty and discipline of America’s fighting forces’. Though she made a lot of money, she went through more (in the afterword to the 1989 edition of Ex-Wife, her semi-estranged son wrote that she spent it on ‘houses, cars, servants, travel, and the better products of Bergdorf Goodman and Bonwit’s’), and by the end of her not-very-long life, she was spending far more time drinking than trying to write. In 1957, at the age of fifty-eight, she died of cancer in a charity ward, deeply in debt and with an arrest warrant still out on her (she had stolen a thousand dollars’ worth of silverware from a friend’s house during a weekend stay). No obituaries of her were written and for a long time no one thought to remember Ex-Wife or the woman who wrote it. 

There are all sorts of reasons why books get forgotten. In Ex-Wife’s case, a few obvious ones spring to mind, most of them having to do with our old companion, misogyny. You could also make a case for the problems of overexposure, American puritan­ical values (misogyny-adjacent) and Parrott’s ridiculous personal life making it quite hard to read her work with a straight face (same). There might be another reason, though, one that I would never have been able to guess from the way the reissue has been marketed – Parrott as a kind of Jazz Age precursor to Jacqueline Susann or Nora Ephron – or from reading the foreword, which emphasises how ‘alarmingly relatable’ Ex-Wife is.

It could be that Parrott’s novel was forgotten for so long because of how utterly, shockingly nasty it is, how dark and brutal its world-view. In its almost unremitting bleakness and its repeated message that women’s pursuit of equality has only made their lives harder and scarier and more shameful, it reminded me of Richard Yates’s The Easter Parade and its horrifying opening line: ‘Neither of the Grimes sisters would have a happy life, and looking back it always seemed like the trouble began with their parents’ divorce.’

Barring some minutely detailed descriptions of outfits and a few interludes where Patricia and her best friend, Lucia, talk about men while getting ready to go out, Ex-Wife is essentially a long series of scenes intended to demonstrate that there is nothing worse or more dangerous than being single, that being married to absolutely any man, even one who hits you and worries that you will stop being pretty when you’re pregnant, is better than being alone. Between being raped, strangled, harassed and humiliated, Patricia congratulates herself for being so pretty and so thin, studying herself in mirrors and reminding herself, and us, that her face is all a woman has in the end. 

Her strongest feelings seem to be reserved for clothing, which she views as armour and, perhaps most importantly, as a weapon, one of the only ones she has. Bumping into a romantic rival, she feels ‘relief that I had worn the gorgeous scarf, because I could not bear to meet her in anything but the best-looking clothes I owned’. Clothes are real to her, as almost nothing else is, including being thrown through a glass door when she tells her philandering, vicious husband that she is pregnant: ‘I lay on the breakfast-room floor, and thought vaguely that things like this did not happen.’ 

Here are Patricia and Lucia, also an ex-wife and the novel’s alleged voice of reason, talking about being single: ‘Women used to have status, a relative security. Now they have the status of any prostitute, success while their looks hold out. If the next generation of women have any sense, they’ll dynamite the statue of Susan B Anthony, and start a crusade for the revival of chivalry.’ I confess that I do not find this particularly relatable, although I do find it alarming. Ex-Wife is a fascinating, creepy document, and I could not put it down. But for anyone on the lookout for a Jazz Age romp about single girls making their way in the big city, this is not at all what you want.