'The Paris Wife': A book review

Published: Sunday, February 13, 2011, 5:35 AM

The Paris Wife
Paula McLain
Ballantine Books, 319 pp., $25

Reviewed by Sherryl Connelly
Probably only students of Ernest Hemingway?s life know much about his first wife, Hadley, beyond the aching fact that she lost a valise containing the entirety of his early work at Gare de Lyon.

But Paula McLain?s novel, ?The Paris Wife,? fleshes out Ernest and Hadley?s love story, and it was that. In 1921, when they married, she was an old-fashioned girl with a traditional belief in devotion to her husband just as female emancipation was in the wind. For a time, that devotion was returned in kind.

In the Paris of the early 1920s, when the ex-pat community was thick with American writers, some of them stars, the couple lived on next to nothing as Ernest found his voice.

Hadley was merely the wife in the salons, including Gertrude Stein?s. Soon enough, she would not even be that, as Hemingway abandoned her for the more stylish Pauline Pfeiffer.

As McLain expresses how their union gave way to betrayal and torment, Hemingway?s own words from ?The Moveable Feast? come to mind. There was time, he wrote sadly, when ?we were very poor and very happy.?

Sherryl Connelly, former book editor of the New York Daily News, lives in Bloomfield. She may be reached at sherrylnews@gmail.com.

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