Revisiting and Rereading Hemingway's: A Moveable Feast and McLain's The Paris Wife

Abstract

In The Paris Wife (2012), a work of historical fiction, Paula McLain offers a response to Ernest Hemingway's memoir A Moveable Feast, published posthumously in 1964. McLain elaborates on the Paris years, focusing on Hemingway's first wife Hadley Richardson. I argue that McLain positions herself as an ideal reader of AMoveable Feast and invites her readers to engage in a similar process of discovery. Readers with a keen knowledge of Hemingway's memoir can grippingly see what McLain is writing against, complementing and creatively "completing." Further, current debates on sexual politics allow readers to approach The Paris Wife from new perspectives.