In Beautiful Little Fools, Jillian Cantor reimagines Fitzgerald’s passive, decorative Daisy Buchanan into a multidimensional woman who accomplishes things, has secrets and survival skills. In the novel, from her own point of view, it reveals how the women of the 1920s were wedded to the societal roles and male fantasies yet also had managed to bargain these roles with grit. Cantor’s Daisy is more than just the gold girl that Gatsby yearns for. She’s a wife, a mother, and a woman living an alternative existence in secret. Her desires are torn she juggles obligation and desire, reputation and rebellion. By removing Daisy’s characterization as merely existing at the edges of Gatsby’s fantasy existence, Cantor returns her back into the very heart of the novel. This shift in position is used to demonstrate a pervasive theme of the novel: the recovery of the feminine self in patriarchal culture. Daisy is all women silenced by literature and history. She is not innocent, but she is human flawed, limited, and powerfully shaped by circumstance. By reimagining in this manner, Cantor critiques the manner in which male narratives mythologize and disempower women. Beautiful Little Fools retrieves that power and tells us there is a clever head and survival strategy behind the flapper frippery and jazz.