What the secretary sawSarah Churchwell

Big Bosses: A Working Girl’s Memoir of the Jazz Age

by Althea McDowell AltemusUniversity of Chicago Press, £10.50, pp. 220

In 1922, writing a facetious review of her husband’s second novel, The Beautiful and Damned, Zelda Fitzgerald made an ironic reference to the fact that Scott Fitzgerald had used sections from her diary in his novel: ‘It seems to me that on one page I recognised a portion of an old diary of mine which mysteriously disappeared shortly after my marriage…’.