Hadley moves on in her life and finds love again. This novel takes you through the journey of a loving couple, a baby they both adored, love and deception and eventually the heartfelt break-up of their life together. I found this to be an interesting and informative part of his life. He suffered from bouts of depression and would go off on his own to work and be alone and deal with his own struggles of the time. The Paris Wife takes you into depth of his struggle to write it and get it published. Of course, everyone knows Ernest Hemingway wrote The Sun Also Rises.

There were so many extremely well written moments in the lives of Ernest Hemingway and his first wife Hadley during the years they were together. I felt McClain did an outstanding job in capturing the time period and the lives of the young and famously wealthy people of that era. I felt it was meant to be written from Hadley’s point of view. I felt I learned things I never knew about this couple and am so glad Paula McClain chose to write Hadley’s story. The novel takes the reader through Hadley’s eyes until the ultimate betrayal and the end of their marriage. This novel tells the passionate love story, their early marriage and then their early life in Paris, the birth of their son and Hadley’s struggle to find herself and her worth and exactly where she belonged while Ernest pursued his dream of becoming an acclaimed writer. While reading the novel the reader gets to know Hadley, feel her strengths and weaknesses and most importantly of all why she stayed in her marriage to Ernest Hemingway. I feel that Paula McClain impressively told that story. In my opinion The Paris Wife was meant to be Hadley’s story based on her experiences being married to Ernest Hemingway during that period in time. I did not find this to be the case for me. It has been mentioned that The Paris Wife was nothing more than an interpretation by Paula McLain of Hemingway’s The Moveable Feast. They fell in with a lively and volatile group which included Gertrude Stein and F.Scott Fitzgerald. It was the exciting Jazz Age of Paris, hard drinking, fast living and free loving. They had a whirlwind courtship and wedding then, at the advice of friends, went to Paris where Ernest could meet the right people who would help and guide him along his path and dream of becoming a writer. Hadley thought this would never happen for her.

This was Hadley Richardson a quiet twenty-eight year old who has all but given up on love and happiness – This is a quote from the back of the book. You both fall deeply and passionately in love and there is no looking back. You are at a crossroads in your life and you meet Ernest Hemingway at a party in Chicago before he became famous. Imagine, if you can, it is the 1920’s and you are a young impressionable woman.

The paris wife hemingway