The Paris Wife
Chicago, 1920. Twenty-eight-year-old Hadley Richardson, a sheltered woman who has spent most of her adult life nursing an aging mother, meets a tall, intense, recently demobbed boy named Ernest Hemingway at a friend's apartment, and within weeks she is engaged. The Paris Wife follows Hadley from their early St. Louis honeymoon through the move to a cold-water flat in 1920s Paris, where Ernest learns to write fiction at the cafes of Montparnasse and the two of them stumble into Gertrude Stein's salon, into Sylvia Beach's Shakespeare and Company, into long evenings with Ezra Pound, and into the season at Pamplona that would become The Sun Also Rises. Paula McLain's 2011 novel, narrated entirely from Hadley's perspective, traces a marriage from glamour through the long, slow betrayal that ended it, recovering the woman who briefly held the most disciplined writer of his generation together.
Themes & atmosphere
Books in conversation with The Paris Wife
A few of the closest reads from our full list.
What you might want to know about The Paris Wife
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
In 1920 Chicago, twenty-eight-year-old Hadley Richardson meets a younger Ernest Hemingway at a party and marries him within a year. The novel follows the couple to Paris in 1921, where Hadley keeps a small Left Bank flat while Ernest writes among Stein, Fitzgerald, and Pound.
Yes. The Paris Wife is fictionalized history of Hadley Richardson, Ernest Hemingway's first wife, during their 1920s Paris years. Paula McLain drew on letters and biographies of both Hemingways.
Reading order does not matter. Both novels by Paula McLain follow different Hemingway wives (Hadley in The Paris Wife, Martha Gellhorn in Love and Ruin). Each is a standalone.
The Paris Wife was written by Paula McLain, published in 2011 by Little, Brown Book Group Limited.
The Paris Wife is 392 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, The Paris Wife takes most readers 6 to 8 hours to finish.
The Paris Wife is a standalone novel by Paula McLain, not part of a series.
The Paris Wife is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.