Ernest Hemingway's first wife, Hadley, in a new novel
I just read a great review of a new novel called "The Paris Wife"
by Paula McLain, in the UK's Guardian. It's by a woman named Hadley Freeman:
"I have been answering the question of where my name's from ever since I could talk...I was not named after someone, I was named after someone's wife...A wife known for nothing other than having been married to and humiliatingly dumped by Hemingway [which] might reflect worse on Hemingway than on my antecedent, Hadley Richardson...
"If I had to be named after one of Hemingway's four wives, I wished my parents had gone for the third instead of the first, bestowing me with the legacy of Martha Gellhorn, the foreign correspondent who was also ditched by Hemingway but because he couldn't cope with a wife who worked...
"[Hemingway was] the sole protagonist of his story, for whom women are either spoilt sluts or sweet saints, there to look pretty, subjugate themselves and then, eventually, be left behind so he can find another girl in another town wearing a lace dress...it explains why, in my experience, so many men love Hemingway...And why I don't.
"...I hated A Moveable Feast -- in fact, I found it enraging. In this posthumously published book, Hemingway indulges in the kind of sentimentality about his first wife that only a man three wives later can.
"...Richardson married again, happily. But if there's one thing worse than having your heart broken, it's hearing the person who broke it indulge in pitying self-deprecation and tell you that, really, although you might have been hurt at the time, it was all for the best. On behalf of Hadleys everywhere, shut up, Ernest.
"...McLain knows, as Richardson did, that a good marriage is so much more interesting than celebrity ephemerality and focuses accordingly. Hemingway realised this too late. 'I wished I had died before I loved anyone but her,' he wrote in A Moveable Feast...."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/mar/10/hadley-freeman-richardson-ernest-hemingway
by Paula McLain, in the UK's Guardian. It's by a woman named Hadley Freeman:
"I have been answering the question of where my name's from ever since I could talk...I was not named after someone, I was named after someone's wife...A wife known for nothing other than having been married to and humiliatingly dumped by Hemingway [which] might reflect worse on Hemingway than on my antecedent, Hadley Richardson...
"If I had to be named after one of Hemingway's four wives, I wished my parents had gone for the third instead of the first, bestowing me with the legacy of Martha Gellhorn, the foreign correspondent who was also ditched by Hemingway but because he couldn't cope with a wife who worked...
"[Hemingway was] the sole protagonist of his story, for whom women are either spoilt sluts or sweet saints, there to look pretty, subjugate themselves and then, eventually, be left behind so he can find another girl in another town wearing a lace dress...it explains why, in my experience, so many men love Hemingway...And why I don't.
"...I hated A Moveable Feast -- in fact, I found it enraging. In this posthumously published book, Hemingway indulges in the kind of sentimentality about his first wife that only a man three wives later can.
"...Richardson married again, happily. But if there's one thing worse than having your heart broken, it's hearing the person who broke it indulge in pitying self-deprecation and tell you that, really, although you might have been hurt at the time, it was all for the best. On behalf of Hadleys everywhere, shut up, Ernest.
"...McLain knows, as Richardson did, that a good marriage is so much more interesting than celebrity ephemerality and focuses accordingly. Hemingway realised this too late. 'I wished I had died before I loved anyone but her,' he wrote in A Moveable Feast...."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/mar/10/hadley-freeman-richardson-ernest-hemingway