MRS HEMINGWAY A novel What Was Lost: Manuscripts and the Meaning of Loss in the Work of Ernest Hemingway

Wood, Naomi (2013) MRS HEMINGWAY A novel What Was Lost: Manuscripts and the Meaning of Loss in the Work of Ernest Hemingway. Doctoral thesis, University of East Anglia.

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Abstract

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.

Item Type:	Thesis (Doctoral)
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Arts and Humanities > School of Literature and Creative Writing (former - to 2011)
Depositing User:	Users 2259 not found.
Date Deposited:	11 Mar 2014 12:31
Last Modified:	11 Mar 2014 12:31
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/48048
DOI:

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