The character is a wealthy socialite from Louisville, Kentucky, who resides in the fashionable town of East Egg on Long Island during the Jazz Age.

[7] Scholar Maureen Corrigan notes that "because she's the one who got away, Ginevra—even more than [his wife] Zelda—is the love who lodged like an irritant in Fitzgerald's imagination, producing the literary pearl that is Daisy Buchanan".

[14] Although early critics viewed Daisy as a "monster of bitchery",[15] later scholars posited that the character exemplifies the marginalization of women in the elite milieu that Fitzgerald depicts.

[20] During the subsequent decades, the role has been played by many actresses, including Betty Field, Phyllis Kirk, Jeanne Crain, Mia Farrow, Mira Sorvino, Pippa Bennett-Warner, Carey Mulligan and Eva Noblezada among others.

Fitzgerald based the character of Daisy Buchanan on Chicago socialite Ginevra King,[21][22] whom he met on a visit back home in St. Paul, Minnesota while enrolled as a student at Princeton.

[3][29] As Lake Forest "was off-limits to Black and Jewish people," the appearance of a middle-class Irish Catholic parvenu such as Fitzgerald in the predominantly White Anglo-Saxon Protestant area likely caused a stir and upset Ginevra's parents.

[30] Ginevra's imperious father, stockbroker Charles Garfield King, purportedly told an out-of-place Fitzgerald that "poor boys shouldn't think of marrying rich girls".

[3] After her family's intervention doomed their relationship, a suicidal Fitzgerald dropped out of Princeton and enlisted in the United States Army amid World War I.

[4][31] While Fitzgerald served in the army, King's father arranged her marriage to William "Bill" Mitchell [wd], the son of his wealthy business associate John J.

[32][33] An avid polo player, Bill Mitchell became the director of Texaco, one of the most successful oil companies of the era,[34] and he partly served as the model for Thomas "Tom" Buchanan in The Great Gatsby.

[58] However, the remark which appears in The Great Gatsby includes an additional observation written by Fitzgerald himself four years later: "That's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.

"[59] This additional sentence identifying with the plight of women in 1920s America illustrates a statement made by Fitzgerald in a 1935 letter to an acquaintance that his mind was "half feminine".

It was full of money—that was the inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in it, the jingle of it, the cymbals' song of it.... High in the white palace the king's daughter, the golden girl.... Daisy Fay was raised in luxury in Louisville, Kentucky, during the Jim Crow period.

The couple moved to East Egg, an "old money" enclave on Long Island, where they resided in a cheerful red-and-white Georgian Colonial mansion overlooking Manhasset Bay.

[64] After her cousin Nick Carraway arrived at the neighboring nouveau riche town of West Egg, he met Gatsby who had become a millionaire and moved to Long Island to reunite with Daisy.

[65] Later at the Buchanan residence, Daisy, Tom, and Gatsby—as well as her friends Nick and Jordan Baker—decided to visit the 20-story Plaza Hotel, a château-like edifice in New York City with an architectural style inspired by the French Renaissance.

[18] Critic Marius Bewley deplored the character's "vicious emptiness," Robert Ornstein dubbed her "criminally immoral," Alfred Kazin judged her to be "vulgar and inhuman," and Leslie Fiedler regarded her as a "dark destroyer" who purveys "corruption and death".

[18] The ensuing contest of wills between Tom and Gatsby reduces Daisy to a trophy wife whose sole existence is to augment her possessor's status.

[17] As an upper-class White Anglo-Saxon Protestant woman, Daisy adheres to societal expectations and gender norms such as fulfilling the roles of dutiful wife, nurturing mother, and charming socialite.

[14] Many of Daisy's choices—culminating in the fatal car crash and misery for all those involved—can be partly attributed to her prescribed role as a "beautiful little fool" who is reliant on her husband for socioeconomic security.

[72] Writer Ester Bloom has opined that Daisy is not technically the story's villain, but "she still sucks, and if it weren't for her, a couple of key players in the book would be alive at the end of it.

"[80] Four years later, in October 2020, the response of Donald Trump's administration to the COVID-19 pandemic was compared by New York Times writer Ian Prasad Philbrick to the careless indifference of Daisy and Tom Buchanan.

[81] The "blasé Buchanans in the novel's final pages," Philbrick wrote, "seemed to fit an administration that has attempted to downplay the pandemic, even after Trump and other top Republicans tested positive for Covid-19.

[82] "You should take Daisy's advice: be a 'fool'," urged writer Carlie Lindower, "Be a fool and covet only what is on the surface—the pearls, the furs, the immaculate lawn—because any deeper than that is murky territory filled with misguided ideals and broken pillars of feminism.

"[82] Similarly, Inga Ting of The Sydney Morning Herald posited that Daisy's materialistic ambitions are both understandable and rational as indicated by peer-reviewed academic studies.

[85] The first actress to portray Daisy Buchanan in any medium was 24-year-old Florence Eldridge who starred in the 1926 Broadway adaptation of Fitzgerald's novel at the Ambassador Theatre in New York City.

[19] The play ran for 112 performances and then paused when its lead actor James Rennie traveled to the United Kingdom to visit an ailing family member.

[19] As F. Scott Fitzgerald was vacationing in Europe at the time, he never saw the 1926 Broadway play,[19] but his agent Harold Ober sent him telegrams which quoted the many positive reviews of the production.

"[102] Critic Lew Sheaffer wrote in The Brooklyn Daily Eagle that Field performed "the difficult feat of making a strong impact" as Gatsby's "vague, shilly-shallying sweetheart.

[109] Vincent Canby of The New York Times, in an otherwise negative review of the film, complimented Farrow's performance as "just odd enough to be right as Daisy, a woman who cannot conceive of the cruelties she so casually commits".