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The Paris Wife

A Novel

By Paula McLain (Author)

Hardcover published by Ballantine Books (Random House Publishing Group)

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The Paris Wife

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About This Book
A deeply evocative story of ambition and betrayal, The Paris Wife captures a remarkable period of time and a love affair between two unforgettable people: Ernest Hemingway and his wife Hadley.

Chicago, 1920: Hadley Richardson is a quiet twenty-eight-year-old who has all but given up on love and happiness—until she meets Ernest Hemingway and her life changes forever. Following a whirlwind courtship and wedding, the pair set sail for Paris, where they become the golden couple in a lively and volatile group—the fabled “Lost Generation”—that includes Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, and F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald.

Though deeply in love, the Hemingways are ill prepared for the hard-drinking and fast-living life of Jazz Age Paris, which hardly values traditional notions of family and monogamy. Surrounded by beautiful women and competing egos, Ernest struggles to find the voice that will earn him a place in history, pouring all the richness and intensity of his life with Hadley and their circle of friends into the novel that will become The Sun Also Rises. Hadley, meanwhile, strives to hold on to her sense of self as the demands of life with Ernest grow costly and her roles as wife, friend, and muse become more challenging. Despite their extraordinary bond, they eventually find themselves facing the ultimate crisis of their marriage—a deception that will lead to the unraveling of everything they’ve fought so hard for.

A heartbreaking portrayal of love and torn loyalty, The Paris Wife is all the more poignant because we know that, in the end, Hemingway wrote that he would rather have died than fallen in love with anyone but Hadley.
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A deeply evocative story of ambition and betrayal, The Paris Wife captures a remarkable period of time and a love affair between two unforgettable people: Ernest Hemingway and his wife Hadley.

Chicago, 1920: Hadley Richardson is a quiet twenty-eight-year-old who has all but given up on love and happiness—until she meets Ernest Hemingway and her life changes forever. Following a whirlwind courtship and wedding, the pair set sail for Paris, where they become the golden couple in a lively and volatile group—the fabled “Lost Generation”—that includes Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, and F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald.

Though deeply in love, the Hemingways are ill prepared for the hard-drinking and fast-living life of Jazz Age Paris, which hardly values traditional notions of family and monogamy. Surrounded by beautiful women and competing egos, Ernest struggles to find the voice that will earn him a place in history, pouring all the richness and intensity of his life with Hadley and their circle of friends into the novel that will become The Sun Also Rises. Hadley, meanwhile, strives to hold on to her sense of self as the demands of life with Ernest grow costly and her roles as wife, friend, and muse become more challenging. Despite their extraordinary bond, they eventually find themselves facing the ultimate crisis of their marriage—a deception that will lead to the unraveling of everything they’ve fought so hard for.

A heartbreaking portrayal of love and torn loyalty, The Paris Wife is all the more poignant because we know that, in the end, Hemingway wrote that he would rather have died than fallen in love with anyone but Hadley.
Product Details
Hardcover (336 pages)
Published: February 22, 2011
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Imprint: Ballantine Books
ISBN: 9780345521309
Other books byPaula McLain
(6)
  • The Paris Wife (Random House Reader's Circle Deluxe Reading Group Edition)

    The Paris Wife (Random House Reader's Circle Deluxe Reading Group Edition)
    A Novel
    This new deluxe eBook edition features more than ninety additional pages of exclusive, author-approved annotations throughout the text, which contain new illustrations and photographs, to enrich your reading experience. You can access the eBook annotations with a simple click or tap on your eReader via the convenient links. Access them as you read the novel or as supplemental material after finishing the entire story. There is also Random House Reader’s Circle bonus content, which is sure to inspire discussion at book clubs everywhere.   “A beautiful portrait of being in Paris in the glittering 1920s—as a wife and one’s own woman.”—Entertainment Weekly   A deeply evocative story of ambition and betrayal, The Paris Wife captures the love affair between Ernest Hemingway and his wife Hadley. Following a whirlwind courtship and wedding, the pair set sail for Europe, where they become swept up in the hard-drinking, fast-living, and free-loving life of Jazz Age Paris—hanging out with a volatile group that includes Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. As Ernest struggles to find his literary voice and Hadley strives to hold on to her sense of self, they eventually find themselves facing the ultimate crisis of their marriage—a deception that will lead to the unraveling of everything they’ve fought so hard for.   NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY People • Chicago Tribune • NPR • The Philadelphia Inquirer • Kirkus Reviews • The Toronto Sun • BookPage   “[Paula] McLain has brought Hadley to life in a novel that begins in a rush of early love. . . . A moving portrait of a woman slighted by history, a woman whose . . . story needed to be told.”—The Boston Globe   “The Paris Wife creates the kind of out-of-body reading experience that dedicated book lovers yearn for, nearly as good as reading Hemingway for the first time—and it doesn’t get much better than that.”—Minneapolis Star Tribune   “Exquisitely evocative . . . This absorbing, illuminating book gives us an intimate view of a sympathetic and perceptive woman, the striving writer she married, the glittering and wounding Paris circle they were part of. . . . McLain reinvents the story of Hadley and Ernest’s romance with the lucid grace of a practiced poet.”—The Seattle Times
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    The Paris Wife

    The Paris Wife
    An instant national bestseller, this stunningly evocative, beautifully rendered story told in the voice of Ernest Hemingway's first wife, Hadley, has the same power and historical richness that made Loving Frank a bestseller. No twentieth-century American writer has captured the popular imagination as much as Ernest Hemingway. This novel tells his story from a unique point of view - that of his first wife, Hadley. Through her eyes and voice, we experience Paris of the Lost Generation and meet fascinating characters such as Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, and Gerald and Sara Murphy. The city and its inhabitants provide a vivid backdrop to this engrossing and wrenching story of love and betrayal that is made all the more poignant knowing that, in the end, Hemingway would write of his first wife, "I wish I had died before I loved anyone but her." From the Hardcover edition.
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    A Ticket to Ride

    A Ticket to Ride
    "It was August. For years it was August . . . . There was heat like wet gauze and a high, white sky and music coming from everywhere at once." In the long, hot Illinois summer of 1973, insecure, motherless Jamie falls under the dangerous spell of her older, more worldly cousin Fawn, who's come to stay with Jamie and her uncle as penance for committing an "unmentionable act." It is a time of awakenings and corruptions, of tragedy and loss, as Jamie slowly discovers the extent to which Fawn will use anything and anyone to further her own ends—and recognizes, perhaps too late, her own complicity in the disaster that takes shape around them.
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    Like Family

    Like Family
    Growing Up in Other People's Houses, a Memoir
    The first book by the author of the New York Times bestseller The Paris Wife is a powerful and haunting memoir of the years she and her two sisters spent as foster children. In the early 70s, after being abandoned by both parents, the girls were made wards of the Fresno County, California court and spent the next 14 years-in a series of adoptive homes. The dislocations, confusions, and odd pleasures of an unrooted life form the basis of one of the most compelling memoirs in recent years--a book the tradition of Jo Ann Beard's Boys of My Youth and Mary Karr'sThe Liar's Club. McLain's beautiful writing and limber voice capture the intense loneliness, sadness, and determination of a young girl both on her own and responsible, with her siblings, for staying together as a family.
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  • December 21, 2012
    LIMELITE
    LibraryThing User

    Hadley Richardson meets, falls in what seems to be love with Earnest Hemingway, and then makes the mistake of marrying him. She is old-fashioned, mid-western, and conventional; he is needy, egotistical, and without a moral compass. Their life together in Paris includes friendships with Gertrude Stein, Scott Fitzgerald, and Dos Pasos. At first his and Hadley's marriage is admired by their Paris “set,” until the strains appear in public. Hemingway, jealous and envious of everyone else’s literary success, ambitious for himself, and envious and malicious of anyone wealthier than himself while pretending to be superior, manages to destroy nearly all his friendships.For Hemingway, life is filled with artificial rules restricting what one is allowed to want and admire and be. For Hadley, fulfillment comes with the birth of their son, a child Hemingway never really wanted but seems to love.Her talent as a pianist remains stultified within her. Hemingway gets support and encouragement and fostering for his talents but really offers her nothing like in return for her loyalty. When the valise she’d packed with all his MSS is stolen from the train, Hemingway never seems to forgive her for what is not her fault.Returning to Paris, Pauline Pfeiffer, whom Hemingway seemed to dismiss as frivolous because of her work as a fashion reporter and devotion to couture, moves in on their marriage and takes Hemingway to her bed. It is a love affair that destroys Hadley’s life, and all the facade of pretend friendships, affectionate nicknames, and hard drinking buddy-ness is not a band-aid strong enough.McLain has written a well-researched fictionalized account of this strange coupling, giving the reader the sense from the first pages of having boarded a fast-moving train hurtling inexorably to its wrecking point. The crash is spectacular and so is the “novel.”

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    Hadley Richardson meets, falls in what seems to be love with Earnest Hemingway, and then makes the mistake of marrying him. She is old-fashioned, mid-western, and conventional; he is needy, egotistical, and without a moral compass. Their life together in Paris includes friendships with Gertrude Stein, Scott Fitzgerald, and Dos Pasos. At first his and Hadley's marriage is admired by their Paris “set,” until the strains appear in public. Hemingway, jealous and envious of everyone else’s literary success, ambitious for himself, and envious and malicious of anyone wealthier than himself while pretending to be superior, manages to destroy nearly all his friendships.For Hemingway, life is filled with artificial rules restricting what one is allowed to want and admire and be. For Hadley, fulfillment comes with the birth of their son, a child Hemingway never really wanted but seems to love.Her talent as a pianist remains stultified within her. Hemingway gets support and encouragement and fostering for his talents but really offers her nothing like in return for her loyalty. When the valise she’d packed with all his MSS is stolen from the train, Hemingway never seems to forgive her for what is not her fault.Returning to Paris, Pauline Pfeiffer, whom Hemingway seemed to dismiss as frivolous because of her work as a fashion reporter and devotion to couture, moves in on their marriage and takes Hemingway to her bed. It is a love affair that destroys Hadley’s life, and all the facade of pretend friendships, affectionate nicknames, and hard drinking buddy-ness is not a band-aid strong enough.McLain has written a well-researched fictionalized account of this strange coupling, giving the reader the sense from the first pages of having boarded a fast-moving train hurtling inexorably to its wrecking point. The crash is spectacular and so is the “novel.”


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  • October 25, 2012
    ZACHMONTANA
    LibraryThing User

    Story of Ernest Hemingway's first marriage to Hadley Richardson. Most of their marriage was spent in Paris and so this also is the story of the American artist/writer community of Paris in the 30s.

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    Story of Ernest Hemingway's first marriage to Hadley Richardson. Most of their marriage was spent in Paris and so this also is the story of the American artist/writer community of Paris in the 30s.


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  • October 20, 2012
    MCHWEST
    LibraryThing User

    Loved this book, not sure what my need to know more about EH is all about but this was a good read. I have to say the fact that I read this after I read Hemingway's Girl by Erika Robuck, it made it so much better. Hemingway's Girl was a novel about Hemingway's life with his second wife in the 30's while they were vacationing in Key West, and although it seems a reverse order to read them knowing of the second "life" before the first made for very interesting reading! Please read both, so worth it, and I might throw in The Sun Also Rises again ,what the heck...

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    Loved this book, not sure what my need to know more about EH is all about but this was a good read. I have to say the fact that I read this after I read Hemingway's Girl by Erika Robuck, it made it so much better. Hemingway's Girl was a novel about Hemingway's life with his second wife in the 30's while they were vacationing in Key West, and although it seems a reverse order to read them knowing of the second "life" before the first made for very interesting reading! Please read both, so worth it, and I might throw in The Sun Also Rises again ,what the heck...


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