I found Mrs. Hemingway in a beautiful charity shop in London and put it on my to-be-read pile. Frankly, I wasn’t even sure if I had the power to read about Hemingway’s wives after Paula McLain’s book The Paris Wife.
I asked my husband to choose a book for me from the library. He looked at it from afar and picked the blue cover book that caught his eye first. Otherwise, I don’t know when I would read this book. I remember being able to sympathize with Hemingway with The Paris Wife. But I could not look at him with any sympathy after this book. Hemingway is a great author but a terrible husband.
Although Mrs. Hemingway is a fictional book, of course, the author has done detailed research on Hemingway and his four wives. The question that kept bugging me throughout the book was: Why did these amazing four women fall in love with this man? Okay, he’s a very different character, and he is one of the greatest authors of his time. But he’s a man who is neither ready to be a father nor a husband.
And of course, Ernest constantly cheats on his wives. Despite this, everyone wants to keep him. What was so attractive about this man? He sat in his room and wrote for hours, went fishing and enjoyed hunting animals. I want to witness what he did to marry these four amazing women. I wish I could go back in time and see Hemingway! (Maybe I’ll fall in love with him too, who knows?)
I would like to see not only Hemingway but also the houses he lived in. Frankly, if you do a short research on the internet, you will see that his homes are more beautiful than the other. They are all wonders of their wives, of course. If you are interested in Ernest Hemingway, read it; it may be a book you will love. Enjoy!
Also, check out Novels About Ernest Hemingway if you are a fan; you’ll find excellent books about him.
Mrs. Hemingway
In the dazzling summer of 1926, Ernest Hemingway and his wife Hadley travel from their home in Paris to a villa in the south of France. They swim, play bridge and drink gin. But wherever they go they are accompanied by the glamorous and irrepressible Fife. Fife is Hadley s best friend. She is also Ernest s lover.
Hadley is the first Mrs. Hemingway, but neither she nor Fife will be the last. Over the ensuing decades, Ernest s literary career will blaze a trail, but his marriages will be ignited by passion and deceit. Four extraordinary women will learn what it means to love the most famous writer of his generation, and each will be forced to ask herself how far she will go to remain his wife…
Luminous and intoxicating, Mrs. Hemingway portrays real lives with rare intimacy and plumbs the depths of the human heart.
Naomi Wood
Naomi Wood is the author of The Godless Boys (Picador, 2011) and the award-winning Mrs. Hemingway (Picador, 2014), which won the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Award, was shortlisted for the International Dylan Thomas Award, and was a Richard and Judy bookclub choice.
Reading this book contributed to these challenges:
