Zelda Fitzgerald's life was made for story. It had page-turning qualities even before Zelda and Scott amended it for the legend.

The tale begins with the indisputably Thespian timing of her birth, which coincided with the start to the new century. Later she saw the dramatic possibilities of a life that paralleled an era.

Even her name had already been fictionalized. When Zelda was born on Tuesday, 24 July 1900, at 5:40 a.m. in the Sayres' house on South Street, Montgomery, her forty-year-old mother, Minerva, herself named for a myth, was known locally as an avid reader. Perusing romantic novels, Minnie had twice run across the unusual name Zelda. In Jane Howard's 1866 Zelda: A Tale of the Massachusetts Colony, the heroine was a beautiful gypsy In Zelda's Fortune, written in 1874 by Robert Edward Francillon, the second Zelda, again a gypsy, 'could have been placed in no imaginable situation without drawing upon herself a hundred stares'. Francillon's line could have been written expressly for Zelda Sayre.

Zelda's rhapsodic looks matched her artistic temperament. Her hair, long and loose, 'was that blonde color that's no color at all but a reflector of light'. And it was the lighthearted Machens, her sunny mother's relations, that Zelda took after, while her brother and sisters were dark like her father's temperament and Montgomery's history Zelda always said that her home town's controversial history strengthened her. Although (or perversely because) prolonged civil war tore the South apart and massacred an entire generation of Southern men, Montgomery citizens were proud that a nation had been born there. Today, more than half a century after Zelda's death, they still are. Montgomery was the Cradle of the Confederacy, and its first flag had been raised from the staff of the state Capitol. In Zelda's girlhood, ghosts of the late Confederacy drifted through sleepy oak-lined streets.

The Civil War, the defining historical event of the Deep South, still vibrated in people's minds. It created a distinctive Southern culture often at odds with itself and the country. During this blood-letting of 1861-5, the Confederate states in the South fought to maintain certain rights, not least the right of the states as opposed to the federal government to determine law on the institution of slavery, the mainstay in the South of an agricultural plantation economy. Thus the South ran counter to the moral beliefs of its time in perpetuating slavery just when the rest of the Western world was decisively giving it up.

In Zelda's birth year, only thirty-five years after slavery was abolished in America, the secret heart of the South still carried an uneasy but powerful sense of the Tightness of its nineteenth-century position on slavery, according to some historians. In adolescence Zelda saw period advertisements which proved lynching, mutilation and the mark of the branding iron had been incontestable methods by which black fieldhands and house servants were kept in check. But what Zelda heard was that these shocking brutalities disturbed the élan of white Montgomery families less than the tragedies that had befallen their own brave youths. For in this volatile environment, the resentments of the blacks were stifled beneath the white romanticization of antebellum plantation life built on slavery.

In her childhood Zelda never questioned the fact that the respectable white families with whom she mixed had been instrumental in upholding laws that penalized Negroes. In her own family her father, Judge Sayre, had even created such laws. Zelda's daughter, Scottie, later wrote: 'I am sorry to say that while he was a just man, known for his unshakable integrity, he was probably one of the sturdiest pillars of the unjust society ... he was author of the "Sayre Election Law", which effectively prevented Negroes from voting until the Civil Rights Act of 1964. So he was one of the heroes of the established order ... but then if you weren't, in those days and in this place, you would have been an outlaw from society.'

What Zelda learned from the Judge and her mother, Minnie Sayre, was that Southerners were fanatical about their Southern beauties, the chivalry of their Southern gentlemen, Union general Sherman's devastating raids, which were instrumental in the Confederacy's defeat. Because she came from an old, established, white Southern family, she understood the symbolism of the South's luxuriant blossoms which atrophied into perfumed decay. She grew up acutely aware that casualty and spoilage could always occur at a moment of great promise to any of the young men who courted her. Zelda's heritage was the proximity of youth and beauty to death and annihilation.

Talking about the dead was therefore common among Zelda's circle. She knew her ancestors were spirited, quixotic and rash. Pioneers and speculators, politicians and lawyers, they raced to the brink and didn't pull back. Zelda felt she took after them. The Sayres and the Morgans on her father's side were illustrious and property-owning while the Cresaps and the Machens on her mother's side were powerful and romantic.

After Zelda's death, when Scottie investigated the Maryland Cresap line that stretched from Zelda's maternal grandmother, Victoria Cresap Mims, back to the seventeenth century, she said it became clear why Zelda emerged from a conservative Southern background as one of the Twenties' most flamboyant figures: 'My mother was descended from some of the most audacious, impetuous, picturesque and irrepressible figures in all of Maryland's colorful history'.

The most audacious was Colonel Thomas Cresap, born 1694 in Skipton, Yorkshire. This quintessential frontiersman had emigrated to the York County side of the Susquehanna River in Maryland, where he ran a ferry across to the present-day town of Washington Boro. Cresap was known as The Maryland Monster' to the Pennsylvanians among whom he settled. Rumoured to be Lord Baltimore's secret agent, he had been granted 500 acres and appointed surveyor, magistrate and captain of the militia in competition with the Pennsylvanian officials. So obnoxious was he to them that finally they sent him to jail. As he was led in chains to the courthouse, hundreds gathered to see the infamous Maryland Monster.

Once released, he impertinently borrowed from his lawyers to move his family to Oldtown, an abandoned Indian village near today's Cumberland. He founded the Ohio Company and became guide, explorer, politician and protagonist in the wilderness drama. Depending on which version you credit, the Monstrous Frontiersman died at the age of 96,100 or 102.

It was Thomas's 'perfect mate', Hannah Johnson, married to him in 1727, who particularly fired Zelda's imagination. Born in Prince George's County, Hannah, a 'darkly handsome Amazon', defended her disputed territory on the old Indian lands of Conejola. When...