The period and setting are hardly untrodden territory for novelists and biographers alike, and McLain owes a great debt, as she cheerfully admits, to A Moveable Feast, Hemingway's own posthumously published memoir of his Paris years. Despite the cobwebs she is, as Ernest quickly spots, "a good clear sort", and so he marries her and whisks her from St Louis to the whirlwind of 1920s Paris, where the likes of Ezra Pound, F Scott Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein can be found thronging every boulevard. Wholesome, a little old-fashioned – "I don't know any jazz, so I'm playing Rachmaninoff" – she's resigned to a spinsterish existence, living unmarried and unemployed in the upper floor of her sister's house. Hadley Richardson (McLain has elected to keep her characters' real names) is 28 when she first meets the glamorous young war hero at a party.
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