| Summary: | This thesis in Creative and Critical Writing comprises two parts. The novel, Mrs Hemingway, is an exploration of the lives of the Hemingway wives: Hadley Richardson, Pauline Pfeiffer, Martha Gellhorn and Mary Welsh. Set in the last weeks of each marriage, from bohemian Antibes to pre-war Key West, Liberation Paris to Cold War Idaho, each quarter is told from the point of view of the next Mrs Hemingway. The novel aims to bring to the fore the female voices that have been lost, or at least sidelined, by the hyper-masculinised narrative of the writer’s life. It also seeks to disrupt the homogenous reading of Hemingway’s first marriage as the only one of lasting importance: a view begun in the author’s memoir A Moveable Feast (1964) and continued in many biographies since. One of the aims of Mrs Hemingway is to draw attention to the other three wives who defied canonisation, and to suggest Hemingway’s feelings for the ‘other Hemingway women’ were very much more moveable than has been previously suggested. The second part is a critical thesis on the subject of loss in Hemingway’s texts. During my creative work, loss became the major governing theme of my novel: the author lost wives, lost words in lost manuscripts, and finally lost his way with words in the 1950s. This thesis investigates the same theme in a critical idiom: how Hemingway’s characters endure loss, and how it is the major – and rather undercritiqued – subject of Hemingway’s texts. The essay also argues that while the author’s fascination with loss spans his whole career, the style and strategy of loss changes in the mid-1930s.
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