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Illustrated portrait of Jordan Baker

A character in The Great Gatsby

Jordan Baker

A tournament golfer and an old friend of Daisy's. She spends the summer with Nick, and tells him what Gatsby wants.

What they want

Never to have to be careful. She says other people will keep out of her way, that it takes two to make an accident, and that she hates careless people.

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
Jordan Baker — tournament golfer, Daisy's friend, Nick's companion through the summer of 1922
From
Louisville, where she and Daisy were girls together
Family
By Daisy's account, one aunt about a thousand years old
Hair
Autumn-leaf yellow
Where she appears
The Buchanans' house, Gatsby's parties, the Plaza suite, and one last conversation in the city
The real person
Edith Cummings, the golfer known as the Fairway Flapper · 1899–1984 · Lake Forest, Illinois

Who they are in the book

Spoiler-free

Jordan Baker is a tournament golfer whose name Nick half-recognizes when he first hears it; she has lost in the finals the week before. She grew up in Louisville with Daisy, was a bridesmaid at her wedding, and is the person who tells Nick the history of Daisy and the lieutenant, which is how the plot gets moving.

Nick spends the summer with her, calls it something less than love and something more than curiosity, and works out fairly early that she is dishonest in a small, constant way. She is also the least deceived person in the book: she does not expect anything of anyone, which is what makes her restful company and what ends it.

How the book draws them

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

  • The carriageFirst seen on a divan with her chin raised, as if balancing something on it that might fall. Slender and small-breasted, with an erect carriage she accentuates by throwing her body backward at the shoulders like a young cadet, and grey sun-strained eyes.
  • The ball in the semifinalAt her first big tournament there was a row that nearly reached the newspapers: a suggestion that she had moved her ball from a bad lie in the semifinal round. A caddy retracted his statement, the only other witness admitted he might have been mistaken, and the thing died away.
  • The borrowed carAt a house party in Warwick she left a borrowed car out in the rain with the top down and then lied about it. That is the moment Nick remembers the golf story, and arrives at his verdict: “She was incurably dishonest.”
  • Careless people“I hate careless people. That's why I like you,” she tells Nick, having just been told she is a rotten driver. It is his word for Tom and Daisy on the last page.
  • The messengerThe novel's exposition is hers. At the party she is the one who has heard the rumours; in the tea garden she delivers the Louisville history and Gatsby's request, and she does it evenly, as gossip rather than as revelation.
  • The last wordAt their final meeting she is dressed to play golf, tells him he threw her over on the telephone, and adds: “I don't give a damn about you now, but it was a new experience for me, and I felt a little dizzy for a while.” Then she turns his own line back on him — he said a bad driver was only safe until she met another bad driver, and she met one, didn't she.

Jordan Baker quotes

Lines spoken by or about Jordan Baker, each verified verbatim against the text and located in the book.

And I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy.
— Jordan Baker (dialogue) · F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925), Chapter 3
Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.
— Jordan Baker (dialogue) · F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925), Chapter 7
They’ll keep out of my way. It takes two to make an accident.
— Jordan Baker (dialogue) · F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925), Chapter 3
All 8 Jordan Baker quotes
Their ending, and the commentary — spoilers aheadHow the book leaves them, what happened after, and what the record says. Open when you're ready.

Jordan survives the summer intact, which in this novel is unusual. She telephones Nick the morning after the accident, is told he cannot see her, and turns up engaged to someone else by the time they meet again. Their last scene is a break-up conducted almost entirely in golf metaphor, and it is the only conversation in the book in which two people tell each other the truth about themselves and nothing much comes of it.

Edith Cummings was Ginevra King's schoolmate at Westover and part of the same Lake Forest circle. She won the U.S. Women's Amateur in 1923, and on August 25, 1924 — while Fitzgerald was writing the novel — became the first golfer and the first woman athlete on the cover of Time, which is where the nickname came from. She never turned professional. In 1934 she married the businessman Curtis Munson, stopped competing, and by her death in 1984, at eighty-five, the sporting world had largely forgotten her; the character has outlasted the championships by a wide margin.

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