The female protagonist in Fitzgerald’s novel The Beautiful and Damned is Gloria Gilbert. She is introduced as a beautiful, glamorous young woman and becomes the wife of Anthony Comstock Patch, the novel’s central male character.
Gloria and Anthony live for pleasure while waiting for Anthony’s grandfather to die and leave him a substantial inheritance. Their extravagant spending, parties, drinking, quarrels, and dependence on wealth gradually destroy their health, marriage, and ambitions. Gloria’s fixation on preserving her beauty and pursuing a possible film career reflects the novel’s criticism of celebrity culture and the idle rich.
Fitzgerald loosely modeled Gloria on his wife, Zelda Fitzgerald, just as Anthony contains autobiographical elements. The novel was published in 1922, following Fitzgerald’s debut This Side of Paradise. The other options refer to different Fitzgerald associations: Zelda Sayre was his wife, Daisy Buchanan belongs to The Great Gatsby, and Nicole Diver is a character in Tender Is the Night.