It’s now considered a masterpiece, but when The Great Gatsby was published a century ago the response was mixed, with one critic writing: “I don’t even know whether it is fully intelligible to anyone who has not had glimpses of the kind of life it depicts.” Back then, this life – which Fitzgerald had been living – was a gilded world reserved for the rich and well connected. His narrator, Nick Carraway, attends his nouveau riche neighbour’s glittering gatherings in the summer of 1922, a time when many US families were living in poverty.

It was only when pocket-sized paperbacks of the book were given to US servicemen during the second world war (courtesy of the nonprofit Council On Books in Wartime) that The Great Gatsby became a hit. Perhaps the young men, far from their ordinary lives and pining for the girls they’d wooed in simpler times, connected with Gatsby (a figure left deliberately obscure by Fitzgerald so that any reader could imprint their own dreams on to him). As the war came to an end, maybe they saw themselves in Nick, the first world war returnee and observer who doesn’t entirely fit into any of the social situations in which he finds himself.

Fitzgerald died in 1940 but his tale of nostalgia, love, class and America continued to connect with each new generation, inspiring artists and readers with its exquisite language and tragic, timeless arc. The people and politics at play in the book still resonate – the ugly far-right sentiments, the east-west coast divide, the negligence of the rich, the potent idea of trying to relive the past.

Today the wealth gap is just as significant as it was in Gatsby’s time, but now everyone has a phone. No matter our background, we can observe decadent lifestyles via celebrities and influencers. Social media allows us all to understand Gatsby’s very particular form of envy and social climbing. Who among us hasn’t hated ourselves for covetously scrolling, pinching and zooming on the curated onscreen life of someone else? Gatsby’s lonely ending, forsaken by all the guests who attended his meretricious soirees, is all too relatable in the age of tall poppy syndrome and cancel culture.

And the idea of men who have grown rich by dubious means flashing their cash and influence to overcompensate, peacock and doggedly pursue a personal dream is no longer unimaginable, it’s the news. We have watched as the brutish, narcissistic and powerful talk in racist terms, lie with impunity and show zero regard for the fallout. Little wonder in the current climate that Fitzgerald’s phrase about the Buchanans has been shared widely on social media: “they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness … and let other people clean up the mess they had made”.

Other, more sentimental, truths in the novel also beguile as much now as they did in 1925 – there’s a reason eternal romantic Taylor Swift hat-tips the novel in her songs (listen to the lyrics of Happiness and This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things). And it’s easy to imagine how the split between the brand-building Gatsby’s public and private personae might resonate with the pop star.

Gatsby is “gorgeous” to other characters and readers because he’s the embodiment of “what if?”, with his meteoric rise and belief in eternal hope. In this way he also represents the American dream: the idea that anyone can become anything. It’s that “what if” fantasy that I wanted to reinterpret in my own novel, Gatsby, a reimagining of Fitzgerald’s story for the 21st century, from the perspective of the people he serves least in the novel: the women.

Fitzgerald’s women are party “moths”, onanistic mistresses, “small-breasted” athletes and beautiful heiresses whose voices “are full of money” – the author himself admitted The Great Gatsby’s lack of fleshed-out female characters was a shortcoming when he wrote to his publisher Max Perkins to discuss why it had flopped on publication: “the book contained no important woman character, and women control the fiction market at present.”

I wondered what the flaying social and public punishment might look like if Gatsby was female and dared to have ambition, how it might feel to receive the contempt we seem to reserve exclusively for women who stumble in the public eye. What might narrator Carraway have to say if she was operating in a world governed by clicks and comparison? Might Daisy be viewed differently if she was a handsome Peter Pan figure who could walk away from a mess as much because of his gender as his insulating wealth? In bringing Fitzgerald’s players forward in time, flipping their genders and giving airtime to the marginalised voices, I’ve tried to create a new way to engage with a literary masterwork. Like the syncopated jazz of Gatsby’s age, a familiar structure of notes reinterpreted into a new melody.