I have just finished reading Paula McLain’s 2019 historical novel, Love and Ruin, about Martha Gellhorn, Ernest Hemingway’s third wife. Gellhorn is quite a match for Hemingway in terms of her demeanor and accomplishment.  She was fiercely independent and ambitious who became one of the greatest war correspondents of the twentieth century.  She was the only woman on Omaha Beach in Normandy during the D-Day invasion.  There are several insightful reflections in this book such as: 

“And yet there is tragedy in the devolving of their love story – once so ardent and intense – into professional rivalry, acrimony, and betrayal, it’s more tragic to me that neither knew happiness with another for long.”

Here is an excerpt from a Kirkus Review.

“Having focused on Ernest Hemingway’s first wife, Hadley Richardson, in The Paris Wife (2011), McLain now turns to his third, writer Martha Gellhorn.

As she did with Hadley and with Beryl Markham in Circling the Sun (2015), McLain closely follows previously published biographical material to create her novel. A journalist who landed with the troops at Omaha Beach and the author of books of fiction and nonfiction as well as a play, Gellhorn is considered one of the most important war correspondents of the 20th century. But when she meets Hemingway in late 1936 in a Key West bar at the beginning of this novel, she’s in her late 20s and has just published her first book. Ernest is 10 years older and still married to second wife Pauline. Having been burned by an affair with a married man, Martha insists that her deepening friendship with Ernest is purely platonic. The reader is not fooled despite their banal, Hemingway-esque dialogue. Ernest’s plan to travel to Spain to cover the civil war there ignites Martha’s sense of purpose and adventure. With his encouragement, she lands in Madrid, where she finds her calling as a journalist—the scene in which she witnesses a child’s death is genuinely powerful—and the two writers begin an affair. Once Franco wins, Martha joins Ernest for an idyllic life in Cuba that’s filled with writing and romance. Pauline remains in Key West, that marriage in tatters. But by the time Martha marries Ernest in 1940, she worries that her husband’s oversized personality, magnetism, and talent might crush her own spirit and ambition. They don’t, but his selfish childishness, competitiveness, and vindictiveness make their relationship untenable. Martha comes across as one tough cookie, Ernest as a great writer but a small man.”

If you want to know more about Hemingway’s dark side,  you will enjoy Love and Ruin.

Tony