LEGEND views Zelda Fitzgerald as the mythical American dream girl of the 1920s, but Sally Cline's long and fascinating biography unveils a tragic figure heading towards insanity through a life of insecurity, much of it at the hands of her brilliant and famous husband, Scott.

Zelda, who as a child felt it her right to disobey family rules and was later to stick a finger up at propriety, first met Fitzgerald at a dance, she twirling around alone, he watching her from the dance floor edge.

As the relationship developed, the golden-haired Scott soon realised that there was a great deal more to the indisputably beautiful Zelda. She was a serious artist, a painter of extraordinary and disturbing vision, a talented dancer and also a witty and original writer.

In fact, Scott was to use much of Zelda's work in his own novels, often word for word, but without any acknowledgement to her, and when she moved into what Scott felt was his own literary territory, he tried to stifle her voice. Resentment and anger felt by both was soon to become a daily routine of their lives.

Zelda's vivid, tragic life (it was to end in a fire in a hospital, where she was being treated for schizophrenia) was lived at the height of what was famously christened the Jazz Age, her glittering circle including Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, Ernest Hemingway, Dorothy Parker, Edmund Wilson and Lillian Hellman.

Cline draws on the written memories of many of these high-lifers to produce a complex and controversial picture of that age, but mostly uses Zelda's own highly autobiographical writings and the hundreds of letters she wrote to friends and family, publishers and others. She also draws on new and revealing medical evidence, and interviews Zelda's last psychiatrist.

However, it is drawing on this wealth of material that also adds an irritating distraction: that is having the reader refer to nearly 60 pages of supporting and additional notes which appear towards the back of the book.

Nonetheless, this powerful portrait successfully reveals a life very different to what we have been told before.

Updated: 08:45 Wednesday, October 02, 2002