Zelda Fitzgerald and Highland Hospital

What is it about Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald that continues to inspire the imagination of those in Asheville? Is it the stark contradictory love of money and rebellion, beauty and darkness, glamour and destitution that says something about the Asheville of the past and present? There are also obvious similarities between our ability today, as much as in the early 20th century, to overlook how much women contribute to the world by focusing on their male counterparts.

Zelda was very much known as the-wife-of-the-author-of- The-Great-Gatsby. The talent of Zelda has been unjustly ignored. This can easily be seen in the new Grove Park condo that has been named, The Fitzgerald as if there were only one former Asheville resident with that name. While it is true that it was Scott who stayed repeatedly at the Grove Park Inn, drinking, womanizing, and generally cracking up, but Zelda was here too. Albeit in a different capacity. She had been committed to the Highland Hospital in Montford. This had been part of her treatment, and where she was repeatedly injected with insulin to send her into shock. She lived in the asylum on Zillicoa Street on and off from 1936 until the unfortunate fire in 1948, in which she and eight other women would perish.

Taking a detour from Zelda’s life, let’s talk about the hospital that would become her final resting place. The…