self-absorbed to notice. Their one-sided romance persisted for the next two .
years. Fitzgerald would send hundreds of letters, but Ginevra, who thought .
them to be clever but unimportant, destroyed them in 1917. The following .
year, Ginevra sent Scott a letter that announced her marriage to a naval .
ensign. Just before Fitzgerald was to meet with Ginevra after a twenty-year .
absence,.
2.
he proclaimed to his daughter, with mixed feelings of regret and nostalgia: .
"She was the first girl I ever loved and have faithfully avoided seeing her .
up to this moment to keep the illusion perfect, because she ended up by .
throwing me over with the most supreme boredom and indifference" (Meyers, .
30). Although heartbroken at the time, Fitzgerald answered Yeats" crucial .
question-- "Does the imagination dwell the most / Upon a woman lost or a .
woman won?" -- by using his lost love as imaginative inspiration. For in .
his 1925 masterpiece, The Great Gatsby, he recreated the elusive, .
unattainable Ginevra as the beautiful and elegant Daisy Fay Buchanan.
Throughout the novel, Fitzgerald described Daisy as an almost disembodied .
voice which, Gatsby realized at the end, was "full of money." Fitzgerald .
wrote, "her face was sad and lovely with bright things in it, bright eyes .
and a bright passionate mouth, but there was an excitement in her voice that .
men who had cared for her found difficult to forget" (Fitzgerald, 14). It .
should be noted that, "Gatsby's ability, like Fitzgerald's, "to keep that .
illusion perfect" sustains his self-deceptive and ultimately .
self-destructive quest, with the help of his own fabulous money, to win .
Daisy back from her husband" (Meyers, 30).
Although Ginevra King was Fitzgerald's first true love, she certainly was .
not his last. In July 1918, while stationed in Montgomery, Alabama with the .
military, Scott met a gracious, soft-voiced girl named Zelda Sayre at a .
