one-time-i-dreamt:

tilthat:

TIL Daisy from The Great Gatsby is based on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s girlfriend, Ginevra King. She broke up with him saying “Poor boys shouldn’t think of marrying rich girls”. The last time they met she asked if someone in Gatsby was based on her. Fitzgerald replied “Which bitch do you think you are?”

via reddit.com

The quote, “Poor boys shouldn’t think of marrying rich girls,” was said by Ginevra King’s wealthy businessman father to FSF, not by her. He didn’t approve of their relationship (King and Fitzgerald were teenagers when they met in 1915 – she was 16 and he was 19 – and most of their exchange happened through letters they sent to each other, while they only met less than 10 times in person) and she ended up marrying the son of her father’s business associate in September of 1918. 

She was Fitzgerald’s first love and he probably thought of her as “the one that got away”, but then he met his wife Zelda in July of 1918 and started pursuing her almost immediately, becoming infatuated with her. They eventually married in 1920. Although Ginevra informed him of her engagement via a letter, their romance had already ended by then due to different factors such as attractions they felt for other people and realizing that they had little in common to begin with. The “bitch” quote is supposedly true, but was said to have been said in a joking manner. 

Ginevra King married twice, raised three children and spent a good portion of her life doing charity work, she founded the Ladies Guild of the American Cancer Society. 

Not a dream, by the way. Just thought it was a shame to show her in such a negative light over something untrue again. His early biographers gave her a bad reputation, but most of the claims against her were proven not to be true after her passing, once her letters to him from that time were published by her family. 

Fitzgerald asked her to destroy all of the letters he sent to her, which she did, but then he not only ignored her polite request to do the same with her letters, but had them typed up so he could read them without emotional attachment and write cliche, fictional exaggerated versions of her. After his death, the letters were sent back to her and she kept them ever since and never felt the need to publish and sensationalize them to clear her own name out of respect for his memory, but they prove their split was amicable. 

More intriguing than her flirting, though, is her ongoing longing for something deeper, a more meaningful life than the one permitted a young woman of her era and social class. “Sometimes I feel oh so tired of dances and flirtations and silly talk and do long to have a long and really serious talk with somebody.” King strikes this note regularly, but never at any length, leaving one to wonder just how eager she really was to have such a conversation.

Fascinating as it is to hear Daisy Buchanan’s original voice, the letters are even more important for letting us make a judgment about the fictional use Fitzgerald made of her. King was, after all, a member of the highest reaches of society, a world from which Fitzgerald himself felt excluded. She was the most glamorous of Chicago’s Big Four debutantes and came from money so old and extensive no one today seems quite sure where it came from. Much as he was intoxicated by this world, Fitzgerald seems early on to have understood its power to corrupt and deaden. In “Winter Dreams,” published in 1920, Judy Jones, the beautiful, icy golfer based on King, seems to be a victim as much as a manipulator.“

I don’t know that Fitzgerald ever captured the real Ginevra in his fiction,” says West, “but then he wasn’t really trying to. Rather, he was creating a character – by beginning with the young girl he had known but amplifying her personality, giving it flaws, and letting his imagination play over the possibilities for the woman she might become.”In most every way, the real Ginevra seems “better” – smarter, more open-minded, less grasping – than her fictional offspring. “She was an open, direct young woman,” says West. “I like her very much.”

As early as the spring of 1915, King was starting to show annoyance at having to fend off Fitzgerald’s insinuations about her thoughts and love life. “Never say again that I’m going to marry Deering!” she scolded in November of 1915. She responded to Fitzgerald’s complaint that she permitted him to idealize her by saying, quite sensibly, whose fault is that? “She got the feeling that Fitzgerald was more interested in her as a character than as a human being,” says West. 

source: http://www.princeton.edu/paw/archive_new/PAW03-04/04-1105/feature1.html