The Hemingway Women: Those Who Love Him - The Wives and Others

Kent, Bernice; Bernice Kert

ISBN 10: 0393017206 / ISBN 13: 9780393017205

Published by W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., New York & London, 1983

About this Item

555 pp. Stated first printing of the first edition! An excellent copy! Over-sized and/or over weight book; may require extra postage. Please note that large and/or heavy items may incur an additional shipping charge. Solidly bound copy and dust jacket with moderate external wear, crisp pages and clean text. Dust jacket shows minor wear in some places. Small stain on top edge.

Seller Inventory # 2iiiBd0044

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Hemingway Women: Those Who Love Him - The Wives and Others
• Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., New York & London
• Publication Date: 1983
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0393017206
• ISBN 13: 9780393017205
• Binding: Hardcover
• Illustrator: Marilyn Sanders (Author Photo); Paul Bacon (Jacket Design); Bernard Klein (Design)
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: Very Good
• Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good

About this title

Synopsis

Profiles the group of extraordinary women who shared Hemingway's life--his mother and four wives--or who served as prototypes for such fictional heroines as Margot Macomber and the idealized nurse in "A Farewell to Arms."

Review

On the overloaded shelf of Hemingway biographies, this perceptive group portrait claims a unique spot. Focusing on his wives, lovers, and female friends, Bernice Kert highlights aspects of the writer's personality that are often shrouded by his hypermasculine public image. Women were certainly attracted by Hemingway's swaggering charm and boundless vitality, but they also discerned an underlying strain of sensitivity and vulnerability he concealed from the world. Although a friend once remarked that Hemingway was the only man he knew who really hated his mother, Kert's stereotype-shattering depiction of their combative relationship limns Grace Hall Hemingway in more nuanced terms than her son ever did and reminds readers that much of Hemingway's creativity and competitiveness came from her. The wives emerge as people in their own right, though journalist Martha Gelhorn was the only one to find her career more interesting than being Mrs. Hemingway. Kert's portraits of the unwitting models for the author's heroines reveal significant differences between the actual Agnes von Kurowsky and the fictional Catherine Barkley in A Farewell to Arms, between Duff Twysden and Brett Ashley in The Sun Also Rises. Hemingway tended to write about the ideal female; Kert restores the real women who shaped his life and art. --Wendy Smith