The Paris Wife

By Paula McLain, Ballantine Books, 2011, 314 pages
Reviewed By Angela Allen, June 22, 2020

The Paris wife is Hadley RIchardson, Ernest Hemingway’s first wife who followed him to many places from 1921-1927, including to Paris. (You’re spot-on: Ernest ran the show.)

Author Paula McLain writes the book in Hadley’s voice, and too bad, because the unglamorous and self-effacing Hadley is a bit of a bore with no passions of her own (minus the piano, sort of — she chickens out of having a concert). She’s nine years older than Ernest, but no big deal, she can keep up with his drinking and skiing and fishing, if not with his ego and drive. Ernest, well — he’s as self-obsessed as ever, except this is the beginning of his fiction career in his early 20s, so Hadley is there to urge him on and pump him up since he’s not yet Somebody Important. He spotted her as a Steady Edwina, and she proved to be so, if a bit needy. (Footnote: He hated his mother who was domineering, which Hadley was not.)

If Hadley isn’t a firecracker, life in Paris post-WWI is exciting—one of my favorite times in history with “lost generation” ex-pats like Gertrude Stein, Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, Pablo Picasso, James Joyce, Sherwood Anderson, Sylvia Beach, Gerald and Sara Murphy, all of whom turn up in the book, drinking and dancing and offering stinging criticism, occasional comfort, and often, competition. It was during that time that Hemingway wrote The Sun Also Rises.

So this novel — it is not nonfiction though it’s based on letters and diaries, research, etc. — pulled me along. It was a bestseller in its early days 10 years ago (I picked it up at a fundraiser last week). Ernest and his women and this cadre of artists make for popular material.

The last third or so of the book is about poor Hadley getting the heave-ho because Hem, a father now, falls for another woman, a good friend of Hadley’s. The menage a trois with leggy Paris Vogue editor Pauline Pfeiffer isn’t good enough for the first or eventual second wife. So you have to live through that breakup, and it’s a bit pathetic, but then again, Hadley recovers and lives a happy post-Ernest life, the afterward indicates, while Ernest perseveres through four wives and then blows himself away with a gun.

It’s a page-turner, however, so if you’re intrigued by this era, read it.