Overlooked No More: Ursula Parrott, Best-Selling Author and Voice for the Modern Woman

This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.

In Ursula Parrott’s estimation, happiness was never more difficult for women to attain than it was in her lifetime. This was a central theme of her writing; from 1929 until the late 1940s, she published 20 books and more than 100 short stories, articles and serialized novels, from which 10 movies were adapted.

Reading them today, one encounters direct and still-relevant discussions about marriage and divorce, sex and its consequences, work-life balance and burnout for career women, and the challenges of child-rearing at a time when many men were free of the burdens of fatherhood and many women were drawn — or pushed, depending on how you saw it — toward life outside the home.

Many of Parrott’s tales are set in New York City and written with the wit, candor and style that is a hallmark of America’s best-known writers of the Jazz Age. And she was, in her day, one of the most widely read and well-compensated authors in America, as well as a formidable public personality whose name appeared regularly in bylines and headlines.

Katherine Ursula Towle was born on March 26, 1899, in the Dorchester neighborhood of Boston to Irish Catholic parents. Her father, Henry Charles Towle, was a doctor; her mother was Mary Catherine (Flusk) Towle.

Kitty, as she was known, attended Girls’ Latin School in Boston and then Radcliffe College, graduating with a degree in English in 1920. She worked as a newspaper reporter until 1922, when she moved to Greenwich Village and eloped with Lindesay Marc Parrott, who became a foreign correspondent for The New York Times.

The Parrotts’ only son, Marc, was born the next year. After a long separation, the couple divorced in January 1928, and Ursula found herself a self-supporting single mother.

“When I separated from my husband,” she told The Los Angeles Times in 1931, “I was lost. I thought mine an unusual case, but I discovered, when I found a job, that there were hundreds just like me. It seemed to me that the divorcée is one of the modern phenomena, one of the new products of the age. She is so new that she doesn’t quite know what to do about herself yet, nor do people know what to make of her.”

After a series of jobs writing advertisements for department stores, she borrowed money from a friend and committed to becoming a writer. Her debut, a semi-fictional novel called “Ex-Wife”  (1929), was recently republished by McNally Editions in the United States.

A delightful rediscovery, “Ex-Wife” is a stylish and witty cautionary tale written from a woman’s perspective about life in hedonistic New York City at a time of significant cultural change. Focused on young marriage, infidelity, divorce, self-sufficiency and remarriage, the novel brims with frustration, exhaustion, conflict and disappointment as it offers representations of sex (consensual and otherwise) and its consequences, including a powerful abortion scene.

“Ex-Wife” brought Parrott (her middle name, Ursula, was the pen name chosen by her publisher, Harrison Smith) overnight success at an extraordinary time: Her first big paycheck coincided with the stock market crash of October 1929. Although an anonymous male reviewer in The Times dismissed the novel as a “True Confessions”-style tale, he also credited it with contributing a “new descriptive tag to the American language”: “ex-wife.”

Perhaps it is not surprising that a woman, Florence Haxton of The New York Herald Tribune, took the novel more seriously. She wrote in her review that Parrott’s novel was “a witty presentation of a whole class of modern metropolitan women” and that it expressed “profound convictions about living and loving.”

Hollywood called, turning “Ex-Wife” into “The Divorcee” (1930), a box-office smash that earned Norma Shearer her only Academy Award, for best actress.

Parrott was hired by movie studios in New York and Los Angeles, where she adapted stories and wrote original treatments and screenplays for stars like Clara Bow, Gloria Swanson and Claudette Colbert while working with the prominent literary agent George Bye on her publishing career: novels, short fiction, magazine serials and nonfiction stories.

She also raised her son (with help from her never-married sister, Lucy Towle, whom she supported on a country estate in Connecticut, an easy train ride from Manhattan) and gave countless interviews about the difficulties women faced in the modern world — especially career women and single mothers.

In 1931, she told the movie magazine Screenland: “This, I think, is the most difficult age of all for a woman to be happy in. Not only has a wife to be a combined Madonna and Cleopatra, but she has often to be a business woman, sharing a 50 percent economic burden with her man, as well as a fairly good athlete, a perfect listener, and — if she hopes to hold her man — she must also put on a ‘clinging vine’ act.”

Given Parrott’s fame, fortune and literary stock in trade, her personal life became newsworthy. Her marital notoriety (three more marriages, to Charles Greenwood, John Wildberg and Alfred Coster Schermerhorn, ended in divorce) often competed for attention with her achievements, among them starting a weekly rural newspaper, The Connecticut Nutmeg, with the journalist and American Newspaper Guild founder Heywood Broun and other literati neighbors.

She also traveled the world, once for an extended story-collecting trip to Russia; flew with the Civilian Air Corps during World War II; and, perhaps most important to her, put her son through Harvard.

In the mid-to-late 1940s, Parrott struggled — financially, mentally and physically — even as she continued to publish and reflect on the second postwar generational change she witnessed in her lifetime. Her last story appeared in Redbook magazine in November 1947.

She had always been a reckless spender and was generous to those around her, squandering the entirety of her fortune as she tried, and ultimately failed, to keep up with writing deadlines and debts.

Scandals followed her. She had a widely publicized dalliance in 1942 with Pvt. Michael Neely Bryan of the U.S. Army, who was awaiting trial on marijuana charges when she drove him out of a military stockade for a night on the town. That led to a military tribunal and a pair of federal indictments (Parrott was charged with subversive activities and enticing Bryan to desert). Although Parrott was found not guilty, this was the start of a series of headline-grabbing misfortunes.

Parrott had long struggled with alcohol — frequenting a circuit of Greenwich Village speakeasies, then blaming the bottle for bad decisions and, like so many other members of the lost generation who used liquor as an analgesic, swearing off booze “forever.”

In the afterword to the 1989 reprint of “Ex-Wife,” Marc Parrott  described his mother’s death “in a charity ward of a New York hospital, of a mercifully fast cancer, in 1957, at age 58.” She was buried, alongside her parents, in Holyhood Cemetery in the Chestnut Hill neighborhood of Brookline, Mass., outside Boston.

Despite ample press about Parrott and her literary career, not a single American newspaper appears to have published her obituary. She suffered the fate of many female authors of her time, inaccurately dismissed as a writer churning out romantic pablum for undiscerning female readers.

Parrott was, first and foremost, a trenchant observer of women like her, who were smart, ambitious and adventurous, but who failed to navigate a brave new world in which the odds seemed stacked against their well-being and continued success. In her penultimate publication, the 1946-47 Redbook serial “Of Course, She’s Older,” Parrott makes this most personal of points through dialogue delivered by a senior magazine editor to her new employee:

“No one guesses how lonely successful women can be, except other successful women.”

Marsha Gordon is the author of “Becoming the Ex-Wife: The Unconventional Life & Forgotten Writings of Ursula Parrott” (2023).