We get to know and appreciate her by being inside her perspective, and we get to know and appreciate Ernest Hemingway as she perceived him. It is well written and offers a well-articulated interpretation of how Hadley Richardson felt, thought, experienced the world and her relationship with Ernest Hemingway.
My Impressions: The Paris Wife is essentially a novelized autobiographical account of Hadley Richardson’s courtship and short marriage to Ernest Hemingway, and concludes at the end of their life together in Paris during the 1920s.
A few of us also are reading The Sun Also Rises, the novel Hemingway wrote during his initial Paris period, while married to Hadley Richardson. (Mar.Why this book: Selected by my literature reading group, along with Moveable Feast, Hemingway’s own version of life during the time described in The Paris Wife. The historical figure cameos sometimes come across as gimmicky, but the heart of the story-Ernest and Hadley's relationship-gets an honest reckoning, most notably the waves of elation and despair that pull them apart. Hadley, meanwhile, makes a convincing transformation from an overprotected child to a game and brave young woman who puts up with impoverished living conditions and shattering loneliness to prop up her husband's career. Toklas, Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald, and Ezra and Dorothy Pound-and the impact they have on the then unknown Hemingway, casting Hadley as a rock of Gibraltar for a troubled man whose brilliance and talent were charged and compromised by his astounding capacity for alcohol and women. McLain ably portrays the cultural icons of the 1920s-Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Meeting through mutual friends in Chicago, Hadley is intrigued by the brash "beautiful boy," and after a brief courtship and small wedding, Hadley and Ernest take off for Paris, "the place to be," according to Sherwood Anderson. McLain (A Ticket to Ride) offers a vivid addition to the complex-woman-behind-the-legendary-man genre, bringingĮrnest Hemingway and his first wife, Hadley Richardson, to life.
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