'Famous Wives' in Fiction

I feel like I have perpetual piles of books waiting for me to read

Over the past five months, I have read multiple excellent novels about “famous wives.” (I was surprised to discover (although I probably shouldn’t have been since one can find lists of just about everything on the Internet) that this is somewhat of a subgenre and that there are lists online of all the “famous wives” books.) I thoroughly enjoyed each of the books I read. I started with The Paris Wife a book I had wanted to read since I first heard about it in the NY Times book review. Anyone who knows me personally or has read this blog (and 99.9% of my blog’s readers fit into the first category :)) knows that I love Paris with all of my heart. The Paris Wife tells the story of Ernest Hemingway’s first wife – Hadley Richardson – and their time together in Paris. 

I love the cover of this book and its title!

While living in Paris in the first half of 2007, I read four Hemingway books: his memoir about Paris, A Moveable Feast; and then his novels The Sun Also Rises, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and A Farewell to Arms. I thought most of them were good but I especially liked For Whom the Bell Tolls. In the years since, however, I’ve come across a few critical commentaries of the book (and Hemingway's books in general)that make me wonder how much I would like the books today. I have so many books I want to read, though, that rereading Hemingway just isn’t a priority for me. So while I wonder if my opinion of him and his books may be different today than it was seven years ago, I accept that I’ll probably never know.

In addition to reading Hemingway in Paris, I also went to the café Le Select (I only went there once as I found other cafes more to my liking) which he was known to frequent, and was thrilled when my friend L. showed me a plaque on a little street off of Place de la Contrescarpe which declared that Ernest Hemingway had once lived there. I understood Hemingway’s appreciation of Paris because I loved it too and therefore was of course super interested in reading this fictionalized version of his life there from Hadley’s perspective.

Hadley and Hemingway in 1922

The Paris Wife was a quick read and one I would recommend. I loved reading about Paris and their life together and Hadley was a fairly likeable character. That said, I am actually more interested in Hadley’s life after she and Hemingway divorced than in their life together. I think that’s because Hemingway was presented as everything to Hadley and it got a bit boring after a while. After I read The Paris Wife, I found out about and then read a book called Mrs. Hemingway, which had four sections, one for each of Hemingway’s wives. While I still enjoyed this book, it was my least favourite of all the “famous wives” books I read mostly because, with the exception of Martha Gellhorn – Hemingway’s third wife and an accomplished writer and journalist on her own – the other three wives were presented as utterly devoted to Ernest Hemingway with no other interests outside of him. The best thing about the book was learning about Martha Gellhorn and being intrigued by how Hemingway went from being married to his second wife – who made him the centre of her world – to Gellhorn, who very much still had a life of her own even during their marriage. I suppose the point of Mrs. Hemingway (and it was a fairly short novel so there wasn’t much room to offer more than a vignette of each wife) was to show the wives’ general relationship with Hemingway.  However, I feel like the author missed the chance to delve deeper into these women’s lives outside of Hemingway and also to paint a more nuanced picture of what life was like for women during these time periods. Perhaps though the author’s point is that Hadley and Fife (Hemingway’s second wife) really did not have interests outside of their husband.

My least favourite of all of the books mentioned in this post

Z A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald came highly recommended to me as a birthday present from A., and did not disappoint. Zelda and her husband F. Scott Fitzgerald are mentioned in The Paris Wife and Mrs. Hemingway (similarly Hadley, Fife and Ernest Hemingway are mentioned this book) and so it was nice for Zelda to have a novel all of her own. Zelda is presented as multifaceted and her own ambitions, her mental illness, her husband’s career, insecurities and drinking problem are all explored with skill and sensitivity.

 Loving Frank was an excellent novel – really engrossing and really interesting. The book is about a woman named Mamah Borthwick who ends up having a years long illicit affair with the architect Frank Lloyd Wright. Mamah is a feminist and struggles throughout the book with finding fulfilling work, with her feelings towards Frank, her role as a mother and her relationship with her children, and the role of women in the first decades of the 20^th century in general. When reading a review of either Z or The Paris Wife someone mentioned this book and I am so glad she did as I had never heard of this book and may not have read it. In some ways the title of the book is a misnomer as while Mamah and Frank’s love story is at the heart of the book, the book is much more about Mamah’s journey as a woman in the world. Of all the books mentioned in this post, this one just may have been my favourite.

My favourite

 The Aviator’s Wife was the last ‘famous wife’ book I read and a terrific read. Anne Morrow Lindbergh, wife of the famous aviator Charles Lindbergh, is a very interesting and complex woman. Like Mamah in Loving Frank, Anne contemplates her role as a mother and her relationship to her children, and has her own ambitions to write and to do more with her life. At times, Anne’s feelings towards Charles were reminiscent of Hadley’s or Fife’s towards Hemingway but this only served to show how one person could have a myriad of contradictory feelings at one time. I finished the book wanting to read Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s book A Gift from the Sea which shows how much I enjoyed the book.

I love the cover!

To conclude, I liked the 3 non-Hemingway ‘famous wives’ books the most because they showed the wives (or lovers) as complex women in their own right grappling with issues of autonomy within a marriage, their own career ambitions versus supporting their husbands’ career ambitions, their roles as mothers in general, and in relation to their roles as wives, and much more. These wives all expressed their own opinions and navigated their lives in a time period when women had to fight for rights women fortunately have today. Reading about their struggles, ambitions and ideas was both fascinating to me and inspired me.