When Marsha Gordon walked into the Irvin Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, her objective was not to uncover a woman lost to history.

In the reading room, combing through the holdings of the Matthew J. & Arlyn Bruccoli Collection of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gordon's goal was to gather information for a book she planned to write on the unpublished screenplays of F. Scott Fitzgerald and the stories behind them. As she flipped through the pages, one story’s lurid title caught her eye. Fitzgerald was hired to adapt “Infidelity” from the original story that was published in Cosmopolitan magazine, written by a woman named Ursula Parrott. “I remember writing, based on a story by Ursula Parrott, who is Ursula Parrott?” Gordon recalls. 

In that moment Ursula Parrott was nudged back into the societal consciousness.  Through this small piece of the collection in Rare Books at University of South Carolina Libraries, a once widely read author’s story was uncovered and able to be retold. 

Gordon’s goals eventually shifted, and she began to focus on uncovering who Ursula Parrott was. This shift would lead to Gordon becoming the first person in decades to have read everything Parrott had ever published, and eventually to the publication of her own book Becoming the Ex-Wife: The Unconventional Life & Forgotten Writings of Ursula Parrott. 

Gordon had to find creative and roundabout ways to research Parrott’s life. Massively successful as a novelist and screenwriter during her lifetime, Parrott died alone and obscure, without a single obituary published in any newspaper. But as Gordon discovered, Parrott’s voice rings with relevance and truth almost a hundred years after her first novel was published. 

As she dove deeper into the backstory of “Infidelity,” Gordon decided to read Parrott’s 1929 bestselling novel Ex-Wife. Because all of Parrott’s books were no longer in print, Gordon had to buy a used copy on E-Bay. And it was like nothing she had ever read. 

“It was so incredible. It was beautifully written; it was of the moment. It was like The Great Gatsby from a woman’s perspective,” Gordon said. After that, she decided to stop the process of writing a book on Fitzgerald and focus on bringing Parrott out of the archive and into the spotlight. 

“No one I knew who had studied American Literature had ever heard of her. . . it was just like, nope sorry she doesn’t exist,” says Gordon.  

Outside of her best-selling novel Ex-Wife, Ursula Parrott published nineteen other books and over a hundred short stories and serialized novels and had ten films adapted in Hollywood. Many of her writings focus on the life of the modern woman in the early twentieth century. Parrott asks questions of society like “what happens when the woman begins out-earning a man in a marriage,” and “what makes a successful marriage work?” 

Parrott’s debut novel, Ex-Wife, was published anonymously in 1929 and became an instant sensation. The novel was essentially a slightly fictionalized version of Parrott’s life up to that point. Parrott married Lindesay Parrott in 1922. They had one child, a son, who was the only child Parrott would have. Their marriage, the first of four for the author, would end in dual infidelities committed by both parties. The marriage of the main characters in Ex-Wife plays out in the same fashion. However, instead of divorce, the couple decide to forgive, and to move forward in their marriage after the affairs, something revolutionary for the period. In a time where infidelity was expected to be met with harsh consequences, and shame, Parrott wrote a story of forgiveness and radical acceptance. 

Most of Parrott’s writings after the smash success of her debut novel continued to focus on these issues facing the modern woman, including, but not limited to, divorcees, career women, single mothers and work-life balance. However, despite her massive successes throughout her lifetime, Parrott died in obscurity. Her son Marc described her death as taking place “in a charity ward of a New York hospital” where she was checked in under a false name.  

According to Gordon, Parrott had “certainly seen her own crash coming for a long time,” she writes in Becoming the Ex-Wife. At the midpoint of her life, Parrott said “Maybe I’ll die of living on black coffee, Scotch, and excitement after all, like a member in good standing of the Lost Generation everyone’s forgotten ever existed.” 

If not for the screenplay Gordon found in the holdings of the Irvin Department, Parrott’s prophecy just may have come to fruition. It certainly held true for the remainder of the twentieth and into the twenty-first century. Though Gordon arrived at Rare Books that day with Fitzgerald in her focus, she left with a name that would send her down a rabbit hole into a world of a woman who wrote not only for the twentieth century woman, but also for women a hundred years in the future. Through the help of Elizabeth Sudduth, Dean of Special Collections at University Libraries, Gordon obtained digital copies of the manuscripts relating to Parrott and Fitzgerald so she could continue her work remotely. And Gordon wants to continue to bring Parrott into the conversation. 

“If you were to ask me, what do I want most, I want people to read Ex-Wife. I want people to read Ursula Parrott. I want more of her works to be in print. For people who are in education at the high school or college level, I would urge them to teach Ex-Wife, to put it next to The Great Gatsby in their units. To me they are the perfect pair of Jazz Age novels,” Gordon explains. 

Marsha Gordon returned to USC Libraries in February 2024 to give two talks on Parrott, the first a general overview of Parrott’s life and legacy in Hollywood and the second specifically focusing on her book, Becoming the Ex-Wife, and what it was like to write about a forgotten woman. She described coming back as “returning to ground zero” of the project. Parrot’s name can even be found in a couple other places in the University Libraries collections, including one copy of Today’s Woman from September 1946 which contains full stories from both Fitzgerald and Parrott and lists their names next to each other on the front page. USC Libraries is trying to fill in items by and about Ursula Parrott to add to their holdings, slowly but surely cementing a place for Parrott among the archives. 

In her time, Parrott had a place next to the great writers of the twentieth century. Gordon’s project asks the question, Why should it be any different today? As Gordon says, “writers and books are not important. They are made important.” Becoming the Ex-Wife makes a strong case for the importance of Ursula Parrott by cracking open an entire world that was hidden in USC Libraries’ archives. Who knows what other Ursula Parrott figures are silently waiting for someone to pluck them from the archive and bring them back to life. 

You can find copies of Ursula Parrott's Ex-Wife here.