The Paris Wife

by Paula McLain

The novel "The Paris Wife" is focused on the love story between two captivating characters: Ernest Hemingway and his wife Hadley Richardson, a story about passion, ambition and betrayal.

The plot is set in Chicago in 1920, when twenty-eight year old Hadley Richardson meets Ernest Hemingway at a party, and her live suddenly changes. Hadley is a solid, Midwest-raised girl, who falls in love with Ernest, quickly and completely, even if her good friend Kate Smith warned her that he can not be trusted. When his career aspirations and the lure of Europe beckon him overseas, she eagerly agrees, though it means the start of a completely new life for the young couple.

After their wedding in 1921, they set sail for Paris. Author Paula McLain captures Hadley’s reservations, as a twenty-eight year old, the struggle between her family and her dreams and love. Her hopes for an idyllic life in Paris are constantly tested by the realities, the place she will live in, of Ernest’s personality, and she is forced into situations that test her strength as a woman, wife, and mother. There, they met Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, Frances Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald and joined a group called "Lost Generation", were they were seen as a perfect couple.

In the Jazz Age, the Hemingway’s, even they were deeply in love, got lost in the hard-drinking and fast-living life, and could not see the values of the family. Ernest was trying hard to find something that will place him in history, he writes about the intensity in way he lives life with his wife and friends in a novel that receives the title "The Sun Also Rises". Meanwhile, Hadley struggles to hold on to her senses and keep being a good wife, mother and muse to her husband. For McClain as for Hemingway, Hadley has value as nothing more or anything less than the ideal Hemingway woman, the perfect Paris Wife, proud that she is not modern but “very beautiful and good, and a bang-up mother besides” in her husband’s eyes.

Even with the great love they had, Hadley finds herself in a moment of crisis in her marriage when Ernest has an unexpected affair and the relationship and everything they build falls apart.The love story between Ernest Hemingway and Hadley Richardson, the golden couple of the 1920 from Paris, it is one of the most known stories from the American literature, and in his memories the author confesses that he should die before he could love another woman besides Hadley. The novel follows the evolution of the relationship between the two lovers, but also the evolution and destruction of their friendship with the other intellectuals from Paris: Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Ezra Pond, and the couple Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

I my opinion, this is the type of book where the story over-shadows everything else, including the writing. However, I really admire the authors’ ability to paint such a passionate and complete picture, revealing a great work and involvement in the research.

Claudia – Elena Voroneanu (L213 : Engleza – Romana)