They made her curious about this woman whom Hemingway seemed to idealize in the memoir he wrote toward the end of his life. Hadley Richardson appears here and there in Hemingway's book about his Paris years, A Moveable Feast - and these glimpses of Hemingway's first wife caught McLain's eye. The story of their romance and marriage has been fictionalized in Paula McLain's new novel, The Paris Wife. It was Richardson who shared Hemingway's years as a poor, still-unknown writer in Paris. The object of the 20-year-old Hemingway's affections was Hadley Richardson, a pretty but unglamorous Midwesterner who was eight years his senior. He is less familiar as a young man in love.

He was a hard-drinking, macho guy who loved bullfighting and big-game hunting. We know Ernest Hemingway was a brilliant writer with a larger-than-life personality.

Their marriage is the subject of Paula McLain's new novel, The Paris Wife. Despite their extraordinary bond, they eventually find themselves facing the ultimate crisis of their marriage-a deception that will lead to the unraveling of everything they’ve fought so hard for.Ī heartbreaking portrayal of love and torn loyalty, The Paris Wife is all the more poignant because we know that, in the end, Hemingway wrote that he would rather have died than fallen in love with anyone but Hadley.Ernest Hemingway and Hadley Hemingway in Chamby, Switzerland in 1922. Hadley, meanwhile, strives to hold on to her sense of self as the demands of life with Ernest grow costly and her roles as wife, friend, and muse become more challenging. Surrounded by beautiful women and competing egos, Ernest struggles to find the voice that will earn him a place in history, pouring all the richness and intensity of his life with Hadley and their circle of friends into the novel that will become The Sun Also Rises. Though deeply in love, the Hemingways are ill prepared for the hard-drinking and fast-living life of Jazz Age Paris, which hardly values traditional notions of family and monogamy. Following a whirlwind courtship and wedding, the pair set sail for Paris, where they become the golden couple in a lively and volatile group-the fabled “Lost Generation”-that includes Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, and F. Chicago, 1920: Hadley Richardson is a quiet twenty-eight-year-old who has all but given up on love and happiness-until she meets Ernest Hemingway and her life changes forever.

The book the paris wife