The Paris Wife by Paula McLain
“Books could be an incredible adventure. I stayed under my blanket and barely moved, and no one would have guessed how my mind raced and my heart soared with stories.”
Hadley Richardson Hemingway is perhaps best recognized as the first of Ernest Hemingway’s four wives. The Paris Wife is the story of how they met, married, and lived in Paris as Hemingway’s writing career was beginning. During this time, Hemingway writes In Our Time, The Sun Also Rises, and The Torrents of Spring. They meet and befriend such Lost Generation writers as Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ford Madox Ford, John Dos Passos, and other key figures in the 1920s. The novel relates the infamous trip to Pamplona that influenced The Sun Also Rises and the couple’s trips to Austria and the dissolution of their marriage when Pauline Pfeiffer, who would become Hemingway’s second wife, enters the picture.
I fell in love with The Paris Wife right from the start. There was something so authentic about Hadley’s voice, the way she described the circumstances of meeting Ernest Hemingway, of being drawn to him, never realizing how their lives would intertwine and separate again.
It portrays Hadley as a woman who never sought the spotlight, but who knew talent and worth when she saw it. As Hadley and Ernest travel to Europe, yearning to find contemporaries who were turning the world of art and literature on its head, then to Canada for an unfulfilling desk position that threatened to crush Ernest’s soul, Hadley never thought of herself as an individual, only as one half of the whole they had become.
Paula McLain has done an excellent work of honoring historically accurate source elements, letters, and words the characters have written themselves about their experiences, so while the tale of Hemingway, told from the viewpoint of his first wife Hadley, is fictionalized, I felt it sounded true to the original views of these literary giants and those who played supporting characters in their lives.
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