Lois Wilson, Betty Field, Carey Mulligan, Mia Farrow, and Mira Sorvino—what do these actors have in common? They have all played Daisy Buchanan on the silver screen, the heroine of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Mulligan starred in Baz Luhrmann’s colorful 2013 adaptation, Sorvino in a 2000 iteration that aired on BBC and A&E, and Farrow in the 1974 film with a script by Francis Ford Coppola. Lois Wilson played Daisy in the 1926 movie, and Betty Field in the 1949 version opposite Alan Ladd as Jay Gatsby. The most recent film iterations of Gatsby are the ones we all likely remember best, but does Daisy’s character stay with us? I remember loving Mia Farrow’s light and breezy, slightly melancholy interpretation of the heroine, but didn’t get much but “beautiful woman in love” from Mulligan’s. I was stunned, in fact, to discover she also played Edith Petty in The Dig, the story of the 1939 archaeological excavation of Sutton Hoo, a deeper and more complex characterization. Maybe that’s because the character of Daisy is something of a light and breezy, unrealized woman. Who is she really? She is charming and funny, ready with an insightful quip. But she often…

Will women’s fiction readers embrace a novel told from the male point of view? Can a woman even write in a man’s point of view effectively? The answer to both questions—absolutely! Two prominent examples from the recent past provide evidence. Sara Gruen’s bestseller Water for Elephants was written in the first person, male point of view, the story told from the perspective of a young man. It attracted scores of readers, many of them women. And Marilynne Robinson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Gilead was written in first person from an elderly man’s perspective as he looked back on his life. Both books, to put it mildly, did very well, proving that a good story well told is the most important criteria for publishing success. Obviously, I’d be thrilled if my book, Sloane Hall, did even a fraction as well as those two successes. Sloane Hall might be inspired by Jane Eyre, but it’s told from the male protagonist’s point of view in the first person. The voice the reader hears throughout the book is that of John Doyle, a young Texas reform school “graduate” who finds work as a chauffeur for a Hollywood starlet about to make her first talking picture in…