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In the dazzling summer of 1926, Ernest Hemingway and his wife Hadley travel from their home in Paris to a villa in the south of France. They swim, play bridge and drink gin. But wherever they go they are accompanied by the glamorous and irrepressible Fife. Fife is Hadley's best friend. She is also Ernest's lover.
Hadley is the first Mrs. Hemingway, but neither she nor Fife will be the last. Over the ensuing decades, Ernest's literary career will blaze a trail, but his marriages will be ignited by passion and deceit. Four extraordinary women will learn what it means to love the most famous writer of his generation, and each will be forced to ask herself how far she will go to remain his wife . . .
The Real-Life Inspiration Behind Mrs. Hemingway by Naomi Wood
It would be a swell joke on everybody else if you & Fife & I spent the summer at Juan-les-Pins?
This is the sentence that made me obsessed with the secret lives of the Hemingway wives. Hadley Hemingway, the author's first wife, effectively writes it would be fine no, swell! for his mistress to holiday with them that fateful summer. I was bewildered. Why would a loving wife invite her husband's mistress on vacation with them?
From that point on, I was hooked. More oddities appeared as I delved deeper. Martha Gellhorn spent weeks sunning herself by Fife and Ernest's pool in 1937. I found a letter from Martha addressing Fife as 'cutie and describing Hemingway's work as 'pretty hot stuff'. Indeed.
Then I discovered Fife and his fourth wife, Mary, had spent many a girls reunion with each other in Key West and Cuba in the 1950s. Why wouldn't they have? Mary joked that they were all graduates of the Hemingway University.
I was swiftly realising that though the wives and mistresses of Ernest Hemingway were often enemies, they were also, quite often, friends. I thought about what a good novel this would make: full of heartbreak, love affairs, a maddeningly seductive central character, a carousel of wives and mistresses that turned each decade, and, of course, too many people drinking far too many cocktails?
In writing this novel I read as much about the Mrs Hemingway's as I could: Hadley, Fife, Martha and Mary. I read their accounts from memoirs. I heard their voices in interviews, watched their manner in films. I got elbow-deep in their love-letters to Ernest, as well as to their letters to one another.
About the Author
More Details
- Contributor: Naomi Wood
- Imprint: Picador
- ISBN13: 9781447226888
- Number of Pages: 256
- Packaged Dimensions: 132x197x23mm
- Packaged Weight: 242
- Format: Paperback
- Publisher: Pan Macmillan
- Release Date: 2015-01-01
- Binding: Paperback / softback
- Biography: Naomi Wood is the bestselling author of The Hiding Game, The Godless Boys and the award-winning Mrs. Hemingway, which won the British Library Writer's Award and the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Award. It was shortlisted for the International Dylan Thomas Prize and selected for the Richard and Judy Book Club. Her work is available in sixteen languages. She teaches at the University of East Anglia and lives in Norwich with her family.
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