Hadley

Biography of Hemingway’s first wife, Hadley Richardson, focusing largely on their courtship, marriage, divorce, and subsequent shared parental responsibilities. Draws on correspondence, family documents, taped interviews with Hadley, and interviews with surviving relatives to reconstruct Hadley’s life, including her unhappy childhood governed by strict Victorian codes. Suggests that Hadley’s influence on Hemingway’s artistry was immense, inspiring him to write from a woman’s perspective in such stories as “Up in Michigan,” “Cat in the Rain,” and “The End of Something.” Diliberto argues that the idealized image of Hadley appears throughout Hemingway’s canon in characters such as Brett Ashley (The Sun Also Rises), Catherine Barkley (A Farewell to Arms) and Maria (For Whom the Bell Tolls) who all desperately desire to escape their wounded pasts through love. Despite the intensity of their passion, however, these romances are doomed from the start, following the same pattern as Ernest and Hadley’s