Catherine

Myrtle's sister. She tells Nick most of what he learns about the affair, and gets a good deal of it wrong.

What they want

For her sister Myrtle to divorce her husband and marry Tom Buchanan. Neither Myrtle nor Tom can stand the person they are married to, she says, and if it were her she would have done it already.

The book

Cover of The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great GatsbyF. Scott Fitzgerald, 1925

F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 novel of love, money, and the Jazz Age — written mostly in France, and often called the great American novel.

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At a glance

In the book: Catherine — Myrtle Wilson's sister, about thirty
Where she appears: The flat on 158th Street, and the inquest
Wears: Pottery bracelets that click incessantly, and a brow drawn on at a rakish angle
Claims: A trip to Monte Carlo last year, and that Tom would marry her sister if his wife weren't Catholic

Who they are in the book

Spoiler-free

Catherine is Myrtle Wilson's sister, a slender, worldly girl of about thirty, and one of the guests at the flat on 158th Street. She arrives with such proprietary haste, and looks so possessively at the furniture, that Nick wonders whether she lives there.

Most of what Nick learns about the affair that evening comes from her, whispered, and a good deal of it is invented. She is also the person the book treats most generously at the end: handed a coroner and a free hand, she says nothing that would sell a newspaper.

How the book draws them

Appearance, manner, and tone — as the book sketches them, in our words.

The corrected browA solid, sticky bob of red hair and a complexion powdered milky white. Her eyebrows have been plucked and then drawn on again at a more rakish angle, and nature's efforts toward restoring the old alignment give her face a blurred air. Innumerable pottery bracelets click up and down her arms when she moves.
The whisper“Neither of them can stand the person they're married to,” she tells Nick, and follows it with her own recommendation: if she were them she'd get a divorce and get married to each other right away.
The lie about DaisyHer explanation for why Tom hasn't married Myrtle: it is his wife who is keeping them apart, because she is a Catholic and they don't believe in divorce. Daisy is not a Catholic. Nick records being a little shocked at the elaborateness of the lie.
Monte CarloTold that Europe would be more discreet than going West, she brightens — she just got back from Monte Carlo, with another girl, by way of Marseilles. They started with over twelve hundred dollars and were gyped out of all of it in two days in the private rooms. “God, how I hated that town!”

Their ending, and the commentary — spoilers aheadHow the book leaves them, what happened after, and what the record says. Open when you're ready.

After the accident, Catherine is the one person who could have told the newspapers everything, and does not. Nick expects the whole tale served up in racy pasquinade; instead she looks at the coroner with determined eyes under that corrected brow and swears that her sister had never seen Gatsby, that she was completely happy with her husband, that she had been into no mischief whatever. She convinces herself of it and cries into her handkerchief as if the suggestion were more than she could bear. Nick's verdict is that she showed a surprising amount of character about it.

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