A Moveable Feast
The memoir that prompted McLain to investigate the marriage and imagine Hadley’s side of it.
Read our takeThe Paris Wife
Paula McLain
The Paris Wife
by Paula McLain
Paula McLain’s historical novel retells Ernest and Hadley Hemingway’s Paris marriage from Hadley’s imagined perspective.
- 2011
- 368
The story, briefly
Spoiler-freeThe Paris Wife begins with Hadley Richardson meeting Ernest Hemingway in Chicago and follows their marriage into the apartments, cafés, friendships, travels, and literary ambitions of 1920s Paris. McLain builds the novel from the documented outline of their lives while inventing Hadley’s interior voice. It is a companion to A Moveable Feast, not a firsthand account.
The full story
Hadley Richardson meets the young Ernest Hemingway in Chicago, marries him, and moves with him to Paris. As Hemingway works toward becoming a major writer, the couple enter the expatriate circle around Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and the trips that will feed The Sun Also Rises.
The novel stays close to Hadley as artistic ambition, drinking, social pressure, and another relationship begin to change the marriage. McLain uses historical events and real people but writes the private thoughts and scenes as fiction.
Why we recommend it
Hadley’s imagined perspective
The novel places Hemingway’s first wife at the center of the Paris marriage he later remembered in A Moveable Feast.
The same years and places
The apartments, friendships, travels, and writing life overlap directly with Hemingway’s memoir.
A more openly emotional version
McLain writes the feelings and conflicts that Hemingway often keeps outside the sentence.
What this book explores
Book editions
- Hardcover
- Ballantine Books
- 2011
- 9780345521309
- Paperback
- Ballantine Books
- 2012
- 9780345521316
Reader reviews
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The Sun Also Rises
The novel Hemingway was writing while the marriage and Paris circle in The Paris Wife were changing.
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Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917–1961
The surviving letters provide nonfiction context for the relationships the novel imagines from within.
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References
References
The sources below include the primary text, editions, scholarship, archival materials, and other records that informed this page. They document The Paris Wife, its publication, and its place in literary history.
1The Paris Wife
NovelPaula McLain, 2011Used forThe primary text represented by this page, used for descriptions of the work’s contents and for any quoted passages shown here.
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