Gatsby's Girl [Paperback]

Caroline Preston (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 23, 2007

Before he wrote some of the twentieth century's greatest fiction, before he married Zelda, F. Scott Fitzgerald loved Ginevra, a fickle young Chicago socialite he met during the winter break from Princeton. But Ginevra threw over the soon-to-be-famous novelist, and the rest is literary history. Ginevra would be the model for many of Fitzgerald's coolly fascinating but unattainable heroines, including the elusive object of Jay Gatsby's unrequited love, Daisy Buchanan.

In this captivating and moving novel, Caroline Preston imagines what life might have been like for Fitzgerald's first love, following Ginevra from her gilded youth as the daughter of a tycoon through disillusioned marriage and motherhood. An engrossing fictional portrait, Gatsby's Girl deftly explores the relationship between a famous author and his muse.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Inspired by the ephemeral but intense historical romance between F. Scott Fitzgerald and his first love, Chicago debutante Ginevra King, Preston bases her sexy, self-centered title character both on Fitzgerald's crush and the female characters (Daisy Buchanan, etc.) for which she was his muse. Ginevra Perry is the spoiled 16-year-old expert flirt who catches Scott Fitzgerald's fancy in 1916 in this gracefully written if drifting novel. The first part of the book excerpts the earnest, epistolary romance between the Lake Forest, Ill., society girl and her less prosperous suitor while she's at boarding school in Connecticut and he's at Princeton. Fickle Ginevra ditches Scott for handsome but dull aviator Billy Granger, with whom she is doomed to a "dried-out husk" of a marriage, but privately continues to keep tabs on Scott while reading his novels for signs of herself in his female characters. This novel, which Ginevra narrates in a mannered, period voice, follows her into her late 30s and strives to echo the sense of loss and promise gone wrong found in Fitzgerald's books. Preston (Jackie by Josie) launches the story from a clever conceit, but the narrator's lack of self-reflection and the gentle arc of her cushioned if not always happy life make for a listless read. (May)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Booklist

Preston reimagines the life of Ginevra King, F. Scott Fitzgerald's first love, changing her name to Ginevra Perry and positing that Ginevra followed Fitzgerald's career and work with interest. In this novel, Fitzgerald meets Ginevra at a party in St. Paul, where she is visiting her boarding-school roommate. The two hit it off and correspond for eight months with only one meeting, until Ginevra's affections cool when Scott comes to visit her at her home in Lake Forest, Illinois. Ginevra turns her attention to Bill Granger, a solid but unimaginative aviator, whom she marries at only 18. Life with Bill and their two children is not the grand romance Ginevra envisioned, and as Fitzgerald's literary star rises, she wonders what life with him would have been like. When she finds herself depicted in his novels and stories, it is clear Scott has never stopped thinking about Ginevra either. Preston's Ginevra is romantic and vain, but she matures somewhat through trying to care for her unstable younger son. An evocative and lively tale. Kristine Huntley
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 336 pages
• Publisher: Mariner Books (May 23, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0618872612
• ISBN-13: 978-0618872619
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 6.6 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (27 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,288,659 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

As a girl growing up in Lake Forest, Illinois, Caroline Preston used to pore through her grandmother's and mother's scrapbooks and started collecting antique scrapbooks when she was in high school. She majored in American Studies at Dartmouth College, and received a master's in American Civilization from Brown University. Inspired by her interest in manuscripts and ephemera, she worked as an archivist at the Rhode Island Historical Society, the Peabody/Essex Museum and Harvard's Houghton Library.

Preston is the author of three previous novels. "Jackie by Josie," a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, was drawn from her (brief) researching stint for a Jackie O. biography. "Gatsby's Girl" chronicles F. Scott Fitzgerald's first girlfriend who was the model for Daisy Buchanan. In "The Scrapbook of Frankie Pratt," she has drawn from her own collection of vintage ephemera to create a novel in the unique form of a scrapbook.

Preston has been awarded a Massachusetts Artist Foundation Fellowship and has had residencies at Yaddo, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Ragdale, where she is a Distinguished Artist. She lives with her husband, the writer Christopher Tilghman, in Charlottesville, Virginia and has three mostly grown-up sons.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An imaginative and compelling story, June 4, 2006

By 

Peter Munro (Galena, Illinois) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Gatsby's Girl (Hardcover)

I am a huge Fitzgerald fan, and have read many biographies from Mizener to Matthew Bruccoli. I was very dubious about reading a historical novel on the subject of his romance with Ginevra King, but was, much to my surprise, won over.

Gatsby's Girl follows Ginevra Perry evolution from an impossibly spoiled self-centered teenager to a mature woman who has gained wisdom through life's hardships-- a troubled son and a ruined marriage. The sixteen-year-old Ginevra spurns the attentions of F. Scott Fitzgerald, and then sees herself portrayed in his fiction again and again.

The novel starts off as satire. The scene of Fitzgerald trying to make a good impression on Chicago high society is painfully funny. By the end, though, I found Ginevra's story moving. It reminded me of my own grandmother who decided against marrying an artist (in her case, an architect) and later felt stiffled by a "safe" marriage to a prominent lawyer.

I was somewhat puzzled by the previous review which took Preston to task for factual mistakes, especially for moving the date of their romance from 1915 to 1916. Preston explains in the historical note at the end of the novel that she intentionally compressed their 2 1/2 year romance into a single six month period in 1916. Preston obviously based her description of the Westover school on Fitzgerald's description in "A Woman with a Past"-- fiction based on fiction. Preston herself suggests that anyone interested in a factual account of Ginevra King should read James West's The Perfect Hour.

I really enjoyed this imaginative and original novel.

9 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great Gatsby's Girl, June 7, 2006

By 

Stokes (Washington, D.C.) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Gatsby's Girl (Hardcover)

I took this book to the beach, where I lost my glasses, so I ended up holding "Gatsby's Girl" a few inches from my face and finding myself absorbed into an early 1900s privileged world. This writer has a natural storyteller's instinct for keeping you going and a sharp eye for the kind of detail that makes you completely believe in what's happening. I didn't always like the narrator, but I never lost interest in her--that's the way interesting people are. And the fact that she was a vivid character when Fitzgerald wasn't on stage surprised and delighted me. I liked that the author didn't try to imitate Fitzgerald's poetic language--it wouldn't have worked for Ginevra. There were no wrong turns here, no false moves, just solid fun summer reading.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Fitzgerald's Flirt, June 11, 2008

By 

Susan K. Schoonover "Sue Yingling" (Boulder, CO) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Gatsby's Girl (Paperback)

I'm not usually a big fan of novels like this that take a fairly obscure historical figure (in this case Ginerva King) with connections to a very famous figure (F. Scott Fitzgerald) and then twist some facts around to create some "what-might-have-been" fiction. I confess I had never heard of King and always supposed Daisy Buchanan and the other silly society girls in Fitzgerald's works were based on his famously tragic wife Zelda. But a little googling confirmed Ginerva as the source for many of Fitzgerald's characters.

Caroline Preston has changed Ginerva's last name from King to Perry for her novel but the similarities between the fictional Ginerva and the Ginerva Fitzgerald fell in love with as a Princeton student are striking. Aside from the same unusual first name both girls hail from the wealthy Chicago suburb of Lake Forest, attend boarding school at Westover in Connecticut and meet Scott Fitzgerald through a roommate named Marie from his hometown of St. Paul, Minnesota. Reality and fiction diverge quite a bit after that though the real Ginerva did apparently escort an emotionally disturbed Zelda to the 1933's World Fair at Scott Fitzgerald's request and Preston recreates this meeting in her novel.

Caroline Preston does a great job of describing life among privileged Midwesterners in the first part of the twentieth century and these descriptions are a major reason to enjoy the novel. The Ginerva of GATSBY'S GIRL does not remain the heartless flirt of her teenage years but grows in to a likable mature woman through the difficulties life hands her. And the book does provide an added interesting perspective to Fitzgerald and his novels.