Love in Paris in the 20’s
"I wish I had died before I loved anyone else" Ernest Hemingway said of his first wife Hadley. Literary geniuses don't make good husbands but they do make for wonderfully bittersweet love stories. The Paris Wife is the fictionalized story of their marriage and their years in Paris from Hadley's point of view.
She was leading a very sheltered life in St. Louis – felt she was barely alive – when she met the handsome young Hemingway, bursting with life. He persuaded her to marry him and they moved to Paris where they could live cheaply and he could devote more time to writing. They were very much in love. Hemingway devoted himself to his work but needed Hadley to ground him. Hadley struggled to find her own identity. She was always the wife off in corner having tea with Alice B. Toklas while Gertrude Stein talked about art and literature with Hemingway. Their circle included also included F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ezra Pound. Then Pauline Pfeiffer, came along…
(There is a local connection. In a break from all that bohemian glamour they do spend a few months in 
Toronto in an apartment on Bathurst Street – just north of St. Clair, the building is now called The Hemingway. Hemingway was working at the Toronto Star at the time.)
You can read Hemingway's version in A Moveable Feast. His memoir of those Paris years when he was young and poor and cold and hungry and happy.
2 thoughts on “Love in Paris in the 20’s”
Sound great, Kathryn. I’ll check it out.
I’m reading it now and really enjoying it. Hadley is a very engaging narrator and provides a compelling portrait of a young Hemingway and life amongst the intellectual elite of Paris in the 1920’s.