ExWife, Ursula Parrott
ExWife, Ursula Parrott
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Ex-Wife

Author: Ursula Parrott

Narrator: Amy J. Johnson

Unabridged: 8 hr 41 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Spoken Realms

Published: 01/07/2025

Synopsis

It’s 1925. Crunched between the Victorian age, WWI, and the Great Depression, women have new freedoms in the Roaring 20s, but do they? Patricia’s husband wants a divorce. She’s still in love with him, but the relationship has turned toxic. Separated from Peter, she’s free to explore her new identity as a businesswoman in her 20s, single again and living in New York City. According to her friend Lucia, women are “Free to pay our own rent, and buy our own clothes, and put up with the eccentricities of three to eight men who have authority over us in business, instead of having to please just one husband.” Can she survive being an Ex-Wife?Published anonymously as part of a marketing gimmick, which drew attention to the scandalous writing, this sensational book sold over 100,000 copies in its first year. The novel explores difficult topics (divorce, abortion, rape, casual sex) via a rare lens - a 1920’s female perspective. Aside from the physical setting of telephones and rotogravures, the emotional tug-of-war for Patricia is just as easy to perceive today as it was almost a century ago.

About Ursula Parrott

Ursula Parrott (1899–1957) was born Katherine Ursula Towle in Dorchester, Massachusetts. After graduating from Radcliffe College, she became a newspaper reporter in New York and married her fellow journalist Lindesay Marc Parrott. The experience of their divorce helped inspire her first novel, Ex-Wife. Parrott became one of the most successful female writers of the 1930s, adapting several of her bestsellers for the screen. Her tumultuous private life included three more marriages. She died of cancer on a charity ward in New York, having spent the small fortune she earned with her pen.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Emily May on May 21, 2024

“It is not true that, in time, one ‘gets over’ almost anything. In time, one survives almost anything. There is a distinction.” I'm so glad I found this book thanks to the new Faber edition. What a vicious, yet entertaining, little slice of 1920s life in NYC. Just as heart-wrenching as Edith Whar......more

Goodreads review by BJ on March 22, 2024

For as long as New York has been New York and college has been college, young writers have left one for the other and discovered that loving in cities is heart-shattering. At some point, they began writing novels about the phenomenon—a habit not yet broken. To be 22 in New York! Writing! Earning mon......more

Goodreads review by Theresa on March 27, 2023

This book was SOOOOO good. The language was as fresh and modern as if it had been written yesterday. I encourage ALL women in their forties or fifties who have been divorced to read this incredible book. Published in 1929, it was SOOOOO ahead of its time. I'd have loved to have met her. I bet Ursula......more

Goodreads review by Christy on July 25, 2024

'This book is not so much a celebration of the unconventional woman as it is a roadmap of the dangers that might befall her' [foreword] It's mid-1920s, New York, and Patricia has become an Ex-Wife, 'Not every woman who used to be married is one. There are women about whom it is more significant to kn......more

Goodreads review by Patricija || book.duo on August 26, 2024

4/5 Su O. Wilde man susisiejusiu sąmoju nuostabiai perteikta santuokos (ir toli gražu ne tik tuometinės) dviveidystė, kuomet atvirumas, tikras atvirumas, priimtinas tik kai jį propaguoja vyrai, kai standartai išimtinai tik dvigubi, o laisvės tik laikinos, vedančios prie amžinųjų lūkesčių ir amžinojo......more

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