55 pages • 1-hour read
The Paris Wife
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Prologue-Chapter 11Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of substance use, addiction, mental illness, illness, death by suicide, and death.
Prologue Summary
Hadley Richardson describes a Paris altered by World War I. She reflects on her husband, Ernest Hemingway, who was wounded by a trench mortar in Italy and carries the mental injury still. In 1923, they move to Toronto for a year to have their son, John “Bumby” Hadley Nicanor Hemingway, before returning to Paris.
The poet and their friend Ezra Pound helps them find an apartment near the Luxembourg Gardens. Hadley outlines their routine: Ernest writes each morning, she walks with Bumby throughout the day, and at night, they often meet friends in Montparnasse cafés. They take day trips and visit family in Illinois. A friend once calls their marriage “holy.” Hadley closes by acknowledging the fragility of marriage and foreshadowing trouble coming in the form of a woman in a “chipmunk coat.”
Chapter 1 Summary
In October 1920, at a party in Chicago hosted by her friend Kate Smith, Hadley plays the piano. She is visiting from St. Louis and is excited by the youthful, energetic atmosphere. A young man, Ernest Hemingway, praises her playing and playfully suggests nicknames.
Ernest asks Hadley to dance. As they move together, Hadley senses an immediate connection and lets herself enjoy the moment.
Chapter 2 Summary
Later at the party, Hadley thinks about her unhappiness living with her sister, Fonnie. Ernest mentions that he grew up near Kate and once had a crush on her.
When other women surround Ernest, Hadley withdraws. Kate joins her, warning that Ernest is complicated and a war hero. Hadley gets the feeling there is some complicated history between Ernest and Kate. Ernest slips out of the party without saying goodbye. In her room, Hadley replays their dance, feeling a new sense of possibility.
Chapter 3 Summary
The morning after the party, Hadley learns Ernest is boarding in the same building when she sees him in the kitchen. He tells her that he is a writer, currently writing “trash copy” but wanting to write something more serious. They talk about Henry James and literature until Kate comes to pick her up for lunch.
Hadley and Kate have a nice afternoon together, but when Hadley asks about Ernest, Kate gets a strange look on her face again. She warns Hadley that Ernest is only 21 years old. They return to the apartment to find that another party is taking place.
That evening, Ernest asks Hadley to read his sketch, “Wolves and Donuts.” She praises his talent, which pleases him. He invites her to dinner and a walk to the Municipal Pier, where he speaks about writing and how the war marked him. Hadley feels his intensity.
The next morning, Kate warns her again about Ernest. In a flashback, Hadley remembers an earlier heartbreak over her piano teacher. During her last week in Chicago, Hadley sees Ernest but tries not to get too involved with him. On Hadley’s last night in Chicago, she and Ernest share their first kiss. The next day, he takes her to the train station, where he kisses her again and promises to write.
Chapter 4 Summary
In another flashback, Hadley recalls her sheltered childhood in St. Louis. At age six, she fell from a second-story window, and afterward, her family treated her as if she were fragile, and she was mostly kept inside. In 1904, her father, James Richardson, died by suicide, and the family found out that he had lost thousands on the stock market.
Although her mother didn’t believe she would deal well with being away from home, Hadley left home to attend Bryn Mawr. While she was gone, her older sister, Dorothea, died from burns. Hadley felt disconnected from her classmates, and she stayed home the following fall. She became depressed and spent the next eight years at home. Just as she was ready to leave, her mother, Florence, became ill, and Hadley cared for her for years. Florence died of Bright’s disease in 1920. Afterward, Hadley determines that she can either die by suicide, like her father, or try to go the “other way.”
Chapter 5 Summary
Now, after returning from Chicago, Hadley is back at her sister’s house in St. Louis. She feels lonely and gives Fonnie only a vague account of her Chicago trip. Her brother-in-law, Roland, brings her a letter from Ernest.
The passionate letter thrills her. Fonnie dismisses it, but Hadley spends the day crafting a reply and encloses a bathing-suit photograph. She mails the letter that evening, feeling hopeful.
Chapter 6 Summary
Ernest and Hadley begin an intense correspondence. Her loneliness eases when her friends Ruth Bradfield and Bertha Doan move in with her. Ernest writes about his bitter relationship with his mother, and a mention of another girl shakes Hadley’s confidence.
Although Ruth, Bertha, and Hadley have a plan to go to Chicago together, when it falls apart, Ruth urges Hadley to go to Chicago alone. While she is there, Ernest tells her he may move to Rome to write, and she supports him. He also describes his heartbreak over his former fiancée, Agnes. Hadley advises him to heal before marrying. They pledge to remain honest with each other.
Chapter 7 Summary
Hadley returns to St. Louis and faces Fonnie’s warnings about Ernest. His letters grow moodier while he saves for Rome, and Hadley fears their connection is ending.
After three days without a letter from him, she resigns herself to loss. The next morning, two letters arrive; the second asks her to marry him and join him in Rome. She accepts at once, then walks into a snowfall, marking a new beginning.
Chapter 8 Summary
Hadley returns to Chicago. Kate calls the marriage ridiculous, sparking an argument between Hadley and Ernest.
They travel to Oak Park to meet his parents, and at the Hemingway home, Ernest’s mother, Grace, overwhelms Hadley with energy and childhood photographs. Hadley meets his father, Dr. Hemingway, and his siblings, seeing the family’s dynamic and Grace’s exacting manner.
That night in Chicago, Ernest leads Hadley to the apartment rooftop, where they make love for the first time. Afterward, he admits his anxieties and his need for her, hoping they will grow old together.
Chapter 9 Summary
The narrative switches to Ernest’s third-person perspective. Ernest swims in Walloon Lake at his family’s house in Michigan. He recalls a charged sexual encounter with Kate, whom he grew up with, on the same dock the previous summer.
He panics about marrying Hadley the next day, fearing both commitment and solitude. He contrasts his feelings for Hadley, who feels “right” and comfortable, with Kate, who challenges him. He decides to marry Hadley despite his inner conflicts and swims back to the dock.
Chapter 10 Summary
Ernest arrives for the wedding, which is taking place near his family home in Michigan, after a fishing trip. Hadley swims with her bridesmaids and reaches an uneasy reconciliation with Kate, who is still reluctantly there. In the church, Hadley walks down the aisle and notices Ernest’s knees shaking. They marry.
After a reception, they row to the Hemingway family cottage, Windemere, for their honeymoon. That night, Ernest admits he sleeps with a light on because of war trauma and says an Italian officer told him marriage is the only cure.
Chapter 11 Summary
In Chicago, the newlyweds live in a squalid apartment and struggle financially. Ernest quits his job, receives rejections, and falls into a depression. Hadley witnesses him cry and hit his head during a severe episode as he admits to nightmares.
Hadley befriends the neighborhood grocer, Mr. Minello. She hosts a dinner for writer Sherwood Anderson and his wife, who tell them to choose Paris over Rome and offer letters of introduction. Soon, Hadley receives an inheritance of $8,000, which makes the move possible.
On December 8, 1921, they board a ship for Europe, leaving Chicago for Paris.
Prologue-Chapter 11 Analysis
The narrative structure of the opening chapters establishes a retrospective framework that generates significant dramatic irony. The Prologue, delivered by Hadley from a future point of disillusionment, functions as a literary prolepsis, outlining the marriage’s trajectory before the chronological narrative begins. By immediately introducing the memory of a woman in a “gorgeous chipmunk coat” (xvii), Hadley’s narration imbues the subsequent account of her and Ernest’s developing relationship with a sense of tragic inevitability. This framing device transforms the story from a simple romance into an elegy for a love already lost. While Hadley’s first-person perspective provides an intimate lens, in this section, this intimacy is deliberately disrupted by the single third-person chapter focused on Ernest’s perspective. This structural deviation reveals his profound ambivalence and deep-seated fears about commitment—insecurities he conceals from Hadley. By providing the reader with access to Ernest’s internal conflicts, the narrative highlights the limitations of Hadley’s perspective and underscores the emotional distances that exist between them, foreshadowing a fundamental disconnect that will ultimately prove irreparable.
Hadley’s character is constructed as a woman actively seeking to escape a past defined by familial tragedy and psychological confinement, a journey that directly engages the theme of Defining the Self in a Man’s World. Chapter 4, a sustained analepsis, provides the essential context for her motivations, detailing a youth marked by her father’s death by suicide, her sister’s death, and the domineering presence of her mother. Fueled by a childhood accident and long recovery, the identity imposed upon Hadley thereafter was that of a fragile individual unfit for an independent life. Her decision to visit Chicago represents a conscious act of rebellion against this prescribed identity, and meeting Ernest offers not just romance but a catalyst for personal transformation. His vibrant energy allows her to access a more confident and liberated version of herself. This change is an active choice; by pursuing a relationship with a man her friends and family deem unsuitable, Hadley reclaims her agency. Her marriage is thus framed less as a traditional union and more as a precarious act of self-creation in an era when a woman’s identity was overwhelmingly determined by her marital status.
The nascent dynamic between Hadley and Ernest immediately foregrounds the theme of The Competing Demands of Love and Artistic Ambition, establishing a structure in which Hadley’s role is intrinsically linked to Ernest’s creative drive. This connection solidifies when Ernest asks Hadley to read his work, positioning her not just as a romantic partner but as his first reader and validator. Her affirmation of his talent becomes foundational to his confidence and their bond. This pattern continues as his literary ambition dictates their life together, from the initial plan to move to Rome to the eventual decision to go to Paris. Ernest’s severe depression in their Chicago apartment is directly tied to his creative frustration, and Hadley’s desire for his happiness, as a partner, becomes intertwined with her role of enabling his art. Her inheritance functions as the critical mechanism that frees Ernest from professional obligations, allowing him to pursue his writing unencumbered. While this is an act of love, it cements a power imbalance in which her resources and emotional labor are primarily channeled into facilitating his genius, a conflict that the motif of the act of writing continuously reinforces.
While these chapters chronicle the formation of a marriage that friends describe as “holy,” they are simultaneously laced with portents of its dissolution, illustrating the initial stages of The Gradual Erosion of Trust and Intimacy. The foreshadowing is both overt, as in the Prologue’s reference to the woman who will “ruin everything,” and subtle, embedded in unresolved tensions, like the conflict surrounding Kate Smith’s assessment of their relationship. Kate’s warnings to Hadley about Ernest’s character are not born of simple jealousy but of a painful, unspoken history that Ernest dismisses, a refusal to engage with the past that demonstrates an early pattern of emotional evasion. Furthermore, Ernest’s confession about his heartbreak over Agnes reveals a deep, unhealed wound that precedes Hadley, suggesting that his capacity for romantic commitment is already compromised. These elements, combined with the anxieties revealed in his third-person chapter, indicate that the marriage is built on a fragile foundation, vulnerable to the catalyst that will exploit these pre-existing patterns of dishonesty and avoidance and the fundamental power imbalance between them.
The relationship is further contextualized within a post-World War I landscape of collective and individual trauma, with both Hadley and Ernest depicted as wounded figures seeking refuge in one another. The Prologue explicitly frames Paris as a city populated by expatriates, for whom there is no true home anymore. Ernest embodies this archetype; his war experience is a continual presence, manifesting in severe nightmares and an inability to sleep without a light on. In a moment of vulnerability, he reveals that his decision to marry was influenced by the belief that it was a therapeutic necessity; he recalls, “After I was shot […] a very wise Italian officer told me the only thing to really do for that kind of fear was get married” (65). Hadley’s own history of trauma is equally defining, leaving her emotionally scarred and adrift. This frames their union as a project of mutual healing. Their bond, therefore, is not merely one of romance but of two damaged individuals clinging to each other as a “cure” for their respective psychological wounds, adding a layer of fragility to their love.
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