Mrs. Hemingway
Ariel Lawhon's 2014 novel rotates through the four women who married Ernest Hemingway, Hadley Richardson, Pauline Pfeiffer, Martha Gellhorn, and Mary Welsh, giving each one her own section and her own crisis point in the marriage. Hadley arrives in Paris in the early twenties as a sheltered Midwestern widow's daughter who suddenly finds herself married to a young, broke, hungry writer. Pauline, her best friend, replaces her in Hemingway's bed at Antibes. Martha, a war correspondent, drinks with him through Spain and Cuba and refuses to be a wife rather than a colleague. Mary inherits the wreckage in Idaho. Lawhon writes the book in close third person, leaning hard on the women's letters and the documentary record, and the cumulative effect is to put the lie to the romantic Hemingway myth without ever flattening him into a villain. The novel made Lawhon's name in the historical fiction lane she has worked ever since.
Themes & atmosphere
What you might want to know about Mrs. Hemingway
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
Each of Ernest Hemingway's four marriages, to Hadley, Pauline, Martha, and Mary, gets its own section, told from the wife's point of view. The novel runs from 1920s Paris to a 1961 Idaho cabin.
Yes. Mrs. Hemingway is fictionalized history of Ernest Hemingway's four wives: Hadley, Pauline, Martha, and Mary. Naomi Wood researched the period extensively. The novel is sometimes confused with Paula McLain's The Paris Wife (about Hadley specifically).
No. The Paris Wife focuses on Hadley; Mrs. Hemingway covers all four wives. They are by different authors. Either can be read first.
Mrs. Hemingway was written by Ariel Lawhon.
Mrs. Hemingway is a standalone novel by Ariel Lawhon, not part of a series.
Mrs. Hemingway is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.