The Paris Wife

"No one you love is ever truly lost."  ~Ernest Hemingway

Hadley Richardson was Ernest Hemingway’s first wife. They met in Chicago when she was in her late twenties; he was younger, a charismatic veteran and newspaperman. He dedicated his books In Our Time and The Sun Also Rises to her.

He wasn’t famous then, of course. He was a doctor’s son and he had a doting mother, but he was determined to be a famous writer. Paris seemed to be the place to achieve this and he asked Hadley to marry him and come with him. They married in 1922 and divorced six years later. 

  Hemingway once said, "There are only two places in the world where we can live happy:  at home and in Paris."

Hemingway writes of Hadley around this time: “You’ve changed me more than you know, and will always be part of everything I am. That’s one thing I’ve learned from all this. No one you love is ever truly lost.”

Mary Chapin Carpenter  writes of the love and uncertainty of love in her song,  Mrs.Hemingway.

His first wife gave Hemingway the creative energy and confidence. The love of the first wife is remembered in this song and  perhaps in the  writer's book  A Moveable Feast. Years later, Hadley herself would remember Hemingway this way to her best friend, Alice Sokoloff, a musician and writer who played piano duets with her in the 1970s, when the two women were neighbors in Chocorua, N.H.  Instead of being bitter toward Hemingway, she is full of gratitude to him for giving her "the key to the world."