Well Read Company Book Reviews: The Great Gatsby

One of our most popular designs is F. Scott Fitzgerald’s American classic The Great Gatsby. Since its publication in 1925, The Great Gatsby has been cemented as a classic of American culture, as a great tale displaying the fascination with the American Dream. It’s relevancy has failed to diminish nearly a century after publication, with so many still finding enlightenment and heartache in it’s hallowed pages. To celebrate this masterpiece we have two different 1920s inspired designs, one featuring an elegant flapper and the other an art-deco pattern.

The Great Gatsby is set in New York and tells the tragic story of Jay Gatsby, a self-made millionaire who throws extravagant parties every night in his West Egg mansion. There the young narrator, Nick Carraway, meets Gatsby and is pulled into the dramatic love affair between him and Daisy Buchanan, a wealthy young woman Gatsby has idolised since his youth. The pursuit of lost love, the personal cost of wealth, and the changeability of our own identities are all ideas explored in a way that still feels fresh and insightful today.

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

The Great Gatsby has been subject to many film adaptations over the years. The extravagant Golden Age setting is one that audiences want to lose themselves in time and time again. Our opulent Great Gatsby designs pay homage to the beauty of the flapper age, where people were throwing off the panic and poverty of the war period to celebrate the joys of peacetime. A sense of nostalgia permeates through the novel, for youth, past love, and also as we can now retrospectively see: the short-lived years of peace.

“I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.”

When F. Scott Fitzgerald died of a heart attack in 1940 at age 44, he had sold fewer than 25,000 copies of The Great Gatsby. In fact, he considered it the weakest of his novels! Little did he know that The Great Gatsby would remain an international beloved classic, having sold over 45 million copies to date. A staple of school reading lists world-over, it is arguably one of the most impactful novels of the English language and one we are proud to pay tribute to! Showcase your love for this wonderful book with our Great Gatsby range of handbags and purses.