This book turned out to be fascinating. I bought it at my local used book place for credits, so it was on trade. It was written in the early 1990's.

Hadley Richardson was the first wife of Ernest Hemingway and nine years older than him. She is the person he based his masterpiece, "A Moveable Feast" upon. "A Moveable Feast" is my favorite book of all time, any author.

Hadley led a sad life for the first half of it, living with her nutty mother and equally nutty and very selfish sister. Her father had committed suicide when she was young. (Later Ernest's father, brother, and Ernest, himself, all committed suicide) She devoted herself to her piano playing and to her family and really had no life of her own until her mother's death, when she was about 28 or so. Then she went to Chicago to visit friends and met the dashing Ernest Hemingway, who was 21 or so.

Eventually they were married about five years and had a son together. A novel called The Paris Wife came out a couple of years ago fictionalizing what happened.

Basically, the Hemingways were happy, living in Paris, with Ernest writing his first novel. Hadley was happy to support him financially in this as she believed in him. They interacted with all the big literary names of the time, there in Paris, including F. Scott Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound.

It was not all perfect. In one of the most famous catastrophes in literary history, Hadley lost all Ernest's early writings (a big briefcase full of them) with all the back-up copies - everything on a train in France. They never were recovered and it can be argued that this was beginning of the end of their relationship, even though Ernest said he forgave her and she felt terrible about it at the time.

It was a little later that Ernest started to get famous, a person came into their lives professing to be Hadley's friend first, but then she went for Ernest with a vengeance. She had a lot of money and aggression and the ability to make things happen.

It was Ernest Hemingway's greatest regret as the quotation on the front of the book says, "I wish I had died before I ever loved anyone but her." A Moveable Feast is a love letter to Hadley and it always brings me to tears.

Now, I have a better understanding of why Ernest Hemingway loved her so much. This book was a real eye opener and very fair to Ernest Hemingway, who acted like a big dumb ox at the time it all happened.

anyone interested in Ernest Hemingway. I took a course in his writing in college and he has always been my favorite writer of the 20th Century.

how fair the author is. Usually Hemingway is condemned as a big jackass for his behavior. I think there was more to it, as evidenced here.

Pauline Pfeiffer, but hey, she was a good stepmother to Bumby I guess. I was surprised at the negativity he felt towards Mary Hemingway (the 4th wife).

go back and re-read Ernest's work and read more about Hadley.

did an amazingly thorough job and I felt she was quite even handed.

if you love "A Moveable Feast" like I do, it will be a true eye opener.

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Created Feb 26, 2014 at 9:05am • Submit your own review...