Paula McLain received an MFA in poetry from the University of Michigan. And the letters to Hadley were sort of eerily asking for approval.' 'And the letters to Ernest were, as one might imagine, letters to a lover. 'During the time was pursuing Ernest, she never lost this pretense that she was Hadley's best friend at the same time - she was sending letters to them both,' McLain says. Richardson was the homemaker and mother, taking care of the child they nicknamed 'Bumby.' Finally, Hemingway began having an affair with one of Richardson's friends, a glamorous young journalist named Pauline Pfeiffer. Hemingway was single-minded about his writing. It was symbolic of how different they were.

McLain says that Hemingway never really forgave her for that.

Richardson lost a briefcase that contained four years of Hemingway's work. Richardson wasn't always taken seriously by these great people - she was just 'the wife.' Still, the Hemingways were seen as something of a golden couple, a fresh and unspoiled contrast to the more sophisticated and perhaps more cynical people who surrounded them. I loved her and I loved no one else and we had a lovely magic time when we were alone.' ' 'And it was, 'I wished I had died before I loved anyone but her. 'This one line stood out to me as I was rereading it,' says McLain. They made her curious about this woman whom Hemingway seemed to idealize in the memoir he wrote toward the end of his life. Hadley Richardson appears here and there in Hemingway's book about his Paris years, A Moveable Feast - and these glimpses of Hemingway's first wife caught McLain's eye. The story of their romance and marriage has been fictionalized in Paula McLain's new novel, The Paris Wife.

It was Richardson who shared Hemingway's years as a poor, still-unknown writer in Paris. The object of the 20-year-old Hemingway's affections was Hadley Richardson, a pretty but unglamorous Midwesterner who was eight years his senior. He is less familiar as a young man in love. He was a hard-drinking, macho guy who loved bullfighting and big-game hunting. We know Ernest Hemingway was a brilliant writer with a larger-than-life personality. Their marriage is the subject of Paula McLain's new novel, The Paris Wife. Ernest Hemingway and Hadley Hemingway in Chamby, Switzerland in 1922.

The book the paris wife