What a double betrayal to Hadley, for her best friend to aggressively pursue her husband. Pauline was beautiful, lithe and athletic (as described by Hemingway) and unlike Hadley in so many ways. Once Hadley’s good friend Pauline entered the picture you could see there was nothing she could have done to keep Hem. Sometimes it seemed little Bumby was neglected, handed off to the nanny a bit much.

I thought Ernest was a bit of dick about Hadley’s pregnancy. I loved some of the descriptors of the restaurants, the boozing, the flirting and music – all of the bohemian get-togethers and parties. I liked reading about the meetings with Gertrude Stein and Erza Pound. Once they married and moved to Paris, things slowly, very slowly, started unraveling for them. As you read about the budding romance and his constant letters to Hadley, you could almost forget that this marriage was destined to fail. He was interesting, energetic, creative and had a determination to be a force in the literary world which was a force of its own. Meeting Hemingway during a visit to Chicago was clearly the beginnings of a new life for Hadley. The beginning of this book outlines Hadley’s early life and the tragedies of her illness, her father taking his life and her mother trying to control her.

That was where I started to lose a bit of interest. Knowing that Hadley was not his only wife (he had four) there was, of course, the expectation of reading about their marriage dissolving. There was a point where I almost bailed on the book but I am glad I didn’t. This historical- part fictionalized novel about Ernest Hemingway and his first wife Hadley Richardson had been on my to-read list for some time.

The paris wife book review