Arlene McKanic

Paula McLain’s fictionalized study of the starter marriage of Hadley Richardson and Ernest Hemingway, The Paris Wife, is a pleasure for anyone who wonders what it was like to be a broke, ambitious writer in Europe in the 1920s. Or, more specifically, a broke, ambitious writer’s wife.

Hadley meets Ernest at a friend’s house in Chicago. She’s in her late 20s, nearly a decade older than he is, and on the verge of permanent spinsterhood. He deflowers her, they marry and flee to Paris, where they can live cheaply and meet all manner of big shots, including Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound. They have a baby, nicknamed Bumby. There’s some drinking, though Hadley doesn’t hit the sauce nearly as much as Ernest. In McLain’s hands, he’s nicer than one would think, and the word that comes to mind for Hadley is “earnest” as she struggles to make homes for them in dinky little rooms while Hem tries to make a living. In clear and unfussy prose, McLain makes the reader long for their Lost Generational squalor.

Indeed, McLain’s talent is such that the fact that few of the characters are likable doesn’t mar her story. Characters need only be interesting, and well-drawn creeps are the most interesting of them all. Exceptions to the overall badness are the Murphys, the rich, cosmopolitan and compassionate couple who adopt both the Hemingways and the F. Scott Fitzgeralds like some folks adopt ugly pound puppies, and of course Bumby, still a child when his parents’ marriage detonates. Even Hadley repels with her love of bullfighting—a woman who gets her kicks from watching an animal tortured to death is simply not someone one can like. When the appalling Pauline Pfeiffer, who will become Ernest’s second wife, crawls into bed with them one drowsy Mediterranean afternoon one doesn’t know whether to cheer or gag. Hadley, like so many of her revered matadors, ends up pretty badly gored, but survives, and lives well into her 80s.

Restrained, perceptive and a bit sad, The Paris Wife is a look at a time and a marriage that weren’t as glamorous and carefree as we’d like to believe. 

Folks who think the political discourse is fraught right now might take a time machine back to the 11th-century British Isles. Everyone—the Gaels, the Normans, the Saxons and other little tribes—was at war, with towns pillaged and burned, farmland sown with salt, and women, children and the elderly force-marched to the lands of their conquerors and sold into slavery (if they were lucky). This is the backdrop for Susan Fraser King’s absorbing historical novel, Queen Hereafter, which imagines the life of Queen Margaret.

Margaret, the Hungarian-born Saxon/Scottish saint, was a refugee herself, thanks to the chaos surrounding the Saxon revolt and the Battle of Hastings. After enduring a miserable sea passage from the continent, she and her mother and sister wash up in Scotland, and are taken in as guests/hostages of King Malcolm II. He’s sort of on the side of the Saxons, whose leader is the very young and uncrowned Edgar, Margaret’s younger brother. In due time Malcolm marries Margaret in what is largely a political deal. He also insists on having Princess Eva from north Scotland as another guest/hostage, the better to rein in her ambitious grandmother, known to us as Lady Macbeth. Malcolm, by the way, killed not only Macbeth but his stepson Lulach, Eva’s father. She’s not as happy to be in the King’s redoubt as she could be.

Yet Eva and the Queen form a friendship. They’re both royal, and the spirited Eva is also a bard whose singing and harp music soothe the gentle, often lonely but deeply pious Queen. But Eva is also a spy for her grandmother, and she’s torn in her loyalties.

Fraser King is good at depicting the particulars of life in this savage time, though much of the savagery is kept in the background. She describes the linens, silks and wool worn by the royal ladies. The food is often coarse and plain, even at the royal table. People drink ale and wine instead of water, which may be contaminated. Her characters draw the reader in, though the devout Margaret can come across as a bit wispy. Fraser King’s Malcolm is not the pious and virginal boy of Shakespeare’s Scottish play. He begins as a ruffian who allows himself to be civilized, but not overmuch, by the wife for whom he cares and who does her duty by bearing him sons—lots of them.

Gracefully and tastefully written, Queen Hereafter gives the reader a glimpse into life as it could have been lived during a fairly obscure and turbulent time in world history.

In 1692, after the overthrow of James VII of Scotland and the installation of William and Mary on his throne, a child-sized woman, abused, malnourished and probably half-crazy, tells her story to a priest sent to convert the “barbarians” of the Scottish Highlands. The woman, Corrag, has fled England to escape the fate of her mother, Cora; like so many wild, strange women versed in herblore, Cora was deemed a witch by their intolerant community and hung. Riding “north and west” on a trusty gray mare, Corrag finds refuge and hospitality among the fierce, Jacobite MacDonald clan of Glencoe. Because their clan leader was late in signing a loyalty oath to the new king, some of them are slaughtered on a snowy winter night by the king’s soldiers, who, appallingly, were their guests. Enough of the MacDonald men, women and children flee to keep the clan going but Corrag, named as the one who warned them of the oncoming massacre, is imprisoned and condemned to burn.

The story is based on both fact (the MacDonald massacre) and legend (Corrag’s warning). The book’s chapters alternate, mostly, between Corrag’s narration and the priest’s letters to his beloved and longed for wife. We see Mr. Leslie’s transformation from a man who unthinkingly supports Corrag’s upcoming execution, since she’s a “witch” and there’s nothing more to be done about her, to a man who feels compassion for her and would like to save her if he can.

Corrag’s narrative is riveting. Fletcher describes her reverence for nature with astonishing beauty, whether Corrag is watching a sky full of stars, or gently picking spiders out of her hair, or befriending a stag who finally takes half an apple out of her hand. Her friendship with the mare who brings her from England to Scotland is vividly told, and heartbreaking—the reader will think of that brave mare long after she’s left the scene.

Fletcher’s characterizations of the people of Glencoe are no less moving. There’s the MacIain, the clan’s gruff leader, who Corrag first meets when she tends his headwound. There’s his son Alisdair, whom Corrag chastely and fiercely loves, and Alisdair’s lovely wife, whose baby Corrag helps deliver. One is tempted to describe Corrag as “fey”—tiny, blackhaired and strange, you can see her being played by somebody like Bjork. But she has a mighty heart, and Fletcher has written a novel worthy of her.

The years before the Revolutionary War were a tumultuous and fascinating time, especially in the larger cities and towns of what was to become the United States of America. In Sally Gunning’s latest novel, The Rebellion of Jane Clarke, this ferment is seen through the eyes of Jane Clarke, a young woman from Satucket, a place of routine and petty rivalries that sometimes turn ugly; in the latest kerfluffle, her father, a miller, is suspected of cutting the ears off a rival’s horse. And Mr. Clarke is not only difficult with his rivals, he’s difficult with his own family. His young wife, the latest in a string of wives, is overburdened and neurasthenic. He barely notices his younger children and exiles Jane, his beloved eldest daughter, because she refuses to marry a man he wants her to marry. He sends her to attend a dotty, elderly aunt in Boston, but instead of the experience breaking her will, Jane blossoms.

The strong will that inspires both love and exasperation in her father helps Jane hone her political and moral conscience. Her training as a nurse in a time of poxes, carbuncles and “gangrenous sore throats” has already made her tough. She rejects the knee-jerk hatred the Bostonians have for the occupying British soldiers. She witnesses what will be known as the Boston massacre and during its particpants’ lengthy trial (which lasted more than a day, a shocking rarity back then) tells the truth of what she saw, a singularly brave act. She weathers a betrayal and grows confident enough to decide what sort of man she will, or will not, marry. She just might even go back to Satucket and stand up to her father.

Gunning fills her novel with believable and complex characters, some of whom are historical figures. She gives us John Adams, passionate, principled and even tenderhearted, and his prickly cousin Sam. We see Paul Revere’s propagandistic engraving of the massacre, and of course, the massacre itself, in its confused rage, musket smoke and splashes of red blood on white snow. Gunning is also good with the particulars of 18th-century colonial life, with drafty keeping rooms and parlors, candles made of grease, guests served cider or beer in place of water that’s probably too dirty to drink. The dialogue can be formal without being too flowery. Best of all, she’s created an intriguing and admirable witness to history in Jane Clarke.