The Paris Wife
A New York Times Best Seller! A deeply evocative story of ambition and betrayal, The Paris Wife captures the love affair between Ernest Hemingway and his wife Hadley. Following a whirlwind courtship and wedding, the pair set sail for Europe, where they become swept up in the hard-drinking, fast-living, and free-loving life of Jazz Age Paris—hanging out with a volatile group that includes Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. As Ernest struggles to find his literary voice and Hadley strives to hold on to her sense of self, 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.
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Community Reviews
This book had a lot of potential in its concept, but ultimately failed in my estimate for a few reasons.
The first is that this is meant to be historical speculative novel centered around Hemingway’s first wife, often lost to history, and telling her story. However, even though it is ostensibly about - and from the POV of - Hadley, it’s mostly just her observing Hemingway’s career. She has no agency or feelings in the story, it feels more like she’s just commenting on events. Whatever the author’s intentions were, it felt like she secretly wanted to write a biography of Hemingway but there’s probably a lot of those, and this felt like a gimmick at getting a biography of hemingway’s Paris years published. It didn’t have enough narrative strength or feeing to be fiction instead of a biography, and writing about Hadley only works if the author cares enough to write beyond the simple statement of events.
The first is that this is meant to be historical speculative novel centered around Hemingway’s first wife, often lost to history, and telling her story. However, even though it is ostensibly about - and from the POV of - Hadley, it’s mostly just her observing Hemingway’s career. She has no agency or feelings in the story, it feels more like she’s just commenting on events. Whatever the author’s intentions were, it felt like she secretly wanted to write a biography of Hemingway but there’s probably a lot of those, and this felt like a gimmick at getting a biography of hemingway’s Paris years published. It didn’t have enough narrative strength or feeing to be fiction instead of a biography, and writing about Hadley only works if the author cares enough to write beyond the simple statement of events.
This was a lovely and frequently sad book. Made me so interested in reading a holistic biography of Hemingway.
Hadley took the back burner to Ernest, but was perhaps the more interesting of the two. She threw herself into her marriage in spite of the odds being against her. When it inevitably ended poorly, she didn't allow herself a great deal of self-pity. I liked her. Darling -- those were some crazy times!
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