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.  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.  Yes, a Hemingway extravaganza.

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. 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.  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 usually fascinating and enriching for me to read books written from an intelligent and sensitive woman’s perspective – it is always different from mine, and I appreciate the differences.

It was hard not to like Hadley Richardson.   Paula McLain paints a sympathetic picture of her protagonist, and from what I’ve read about her elsewhere, justifiably so.  I also appreciated that McLain was fair to Ernest Hemingway.  We got to know him through Hadley Richardson’s adoring and ultimately heart broken eyes , but McLain included a few short chapters, written in third person, which offer us a fair and sympathetic view of his perspective on what he was experiencing.

McLain built her novel upon much research into the facts, events, and accounts that are extant surrounding Richardson’s and Hemingway’s real lives and experiences.  And there are numerous resources to draw from – so the story she wrote is probably not too far from the reality. Hadley Richardson had grown up in a sheltered upper-middle class environment and was six years older than Hemingway.  He was in his early 20s, and was recently back from serving in WW1 where he had been injured in the fighting in Italy (his novel Farewell to Arms is semi-autobiographical account of his experiences).  Hemingway courted her aggressively, they fell in love,  and after less than a year they married and moved to Paris.

There he intended to launch his career as a writer. Their circle of friends included such luminaries in American letters as Gertrude Stein, Ford Maddox Ford, Scott Fitzgerald, Jon Dos Passos among others.  An interesting part of the book is the picture it paints of a group of fairly well-to-do Americans living in Paris, with a fair amount of freedom, travelling, amusing themselves in different settings in Europe, lots of alcohol and socializing.  After several years, Hadley and Hemingway had a child, and their marriage was happy and thriving, until Hemingway fell in love with another woman who was part of their circle of friends.  He insisted on loving them both, didn’t want a divorce, and saw no reason why he couldn’t love two women simultaneously.  Hadley insisted that that wouldn’t work, at least not for her, and though for a while she tried, she realized she could not share him with the other. In the last quarter of The Paris Wife we experience the sad unraveling of a marriage between two good people who still very much loved each other.

Though McLain is generally sympathetic to Hemingway, many of the women in our reading group really don’t like him.  Most of the men do.  Interesting, eh?

A Moveable Feast did not add much to The Paris Wife – it was published posthumously and is more a collection of loosely connected short stories based on Hemingway’s recollections from when he was much older. These stories just don’t have the energy or pathos that would make them compelling.   The Sun Also Rises was different. Hemingway was writing it through much of the period described in The Paris Wife, and I could get a sense of the man Paula McLain’s Hadley Richardson was describing in The Paris Wife.  in fact, Sun is based on a key piece of The Paris Wife story.  For those interested in knowing more about that connection, I’d recommend a recent article in Vanity Fair  which explains it pretty well. My recommendation would be to read The Sun Also Rises immediately after The Paris Wife, and perhaps read A Moveable Feast a chapter (story) at a time, separately.