For a long time, I seriously considered getting two sets of business cards printed. Two sets, replying to the two comments I hear, always in the same order, every time I introduce myself to someone new. In reply to the observation that my name is odd or, if the person is being polite, "unique", the first set of cards would read, "Do you think? Why, I'd never thought about that before – by Jove, you're right!"
The second set of cards would be a little more informative if only slightly less sarcastic: "Ernest Hemingway's first wife," they would read. "Whatever."
I have been answering the question of where my name's from ever since I could talk, which partly explains the glib inarticulacy of my answer. But the real problem has never been the question, it's the answer.
I was not named after someone, I was named after someone's wife. A Wag, in other words, with a name that makes me sound like an investment bank, and not even an investment bank wants to sound like one these days. A wife known for nothing other than having been married to and humiliatingly dumped by Hemingway as soon as he got a lick of fame. This might reflect worse on Hemingway than on my antecedent, Hadley Richardson, but it hardly felt like an admirable inheritance.
Even Hemingway seemed to have held her in low regard. The Sun Also Rises was written not just during their six-year marriage but specifically about that time, and he included anecdotes about their friends, their hangouts, their travels, everything. Everything, that is, except Richardson, although he did then guiltily stick her in the dedication. The few biographical details I could find about her universally stressed one quality: her devoted support of Hemingway, devotion that was thrown back in her face when he left her for a woman who was part of their Parisian social circle. If I had to be named after one of Hemingway's four wives, I wished my parents had gone for the third instead of the first, bestowing me with the legacy of Martha Gellhorn, the foreign correspondent who was also ditched by Hemingway but because he couldn't cope with a wife who worked, not – as happened to Richardson – because he ran off with the fashion editor Pauline Pfeiffer.
This point brings me to another problem I have with my name: I hate Hemingway. His gratingly self-conscious style – all brutalised declarative sentences – has, to my ears, the rhythm of a pub bore sounding off. More repugnant than his style is his mentality. He is the literary version of the worst of Bob Dylan, purveying that tired cliche of a man as solitary figure, necessarily selfish and the sole protagonist of his story, for whom women are either spoilt sluts or sweet saints, there to look pretty, subjugate themselves and then, eventually, be left behind so he can find another girl in another town wearing a lace dress. It's such a boring, sophomoric view, one almost excusable in a twentysomething man, less so in a fiftysomething, and it explains why, in my experience, so many men love Hemingway (and Dylan, come to that). And why I don't.
Personally, he sounded even worse. "Larger than life" is a popular description of Hemingway, and one that in my experience is shorthand for "a big pain in the bum". He alienated pretty much all of his friends, including the most slavering hangers on. He even managed to try the patience of F Scott Fitzgerald with his casual cruelty and selfishness, which is like shocking Charlie Sheen by your drugs intake.
My parents suggested that reading A Moveable Feast might give me a better appreciation of my namesake. On this rare occasion, my parents were wrong. I hated A Moveable Feast – in fact, I found it enraging. In this posthumously published book, Hemingway indulges in the kind of sentimentality about his first wife that only a man three wives later can. He describes, with creepy self-indulgence, her "beautiful, wonderfully strong legs" and makes the frankly obvious point that Richardson was blameless for the end of their marriage, suggesting he once told himself otherwise. Richardson, Hemingway writes, was "the only one . . . who came well out of it finally and married a much finer man than I ever was or could ever hope to be and is happy and deserves it and that was one good and lasting thing that came out of that year".
This is all true – Richardson married again, happily. But if there's one thing worse than having your heart broken, it's hearing the person who broke it indulge in pitying self-deprecation and tell you that, really, although you might have been hurt at the time, it was all for the best. On behalf of Hadleys everywhere, shut up, Ernest.
So no, A Moveable Feast failed to sway me. But another book did.
Last year, I received an email from an editor telling me that a book about Hadley Richardson was being published and maybe I'd like a copy. Would I? Well, maybe, though I was pretty sure what I would get: a clunky book in which Richardson was merely the empty vessel through which to view Hemingway. After all, she was only Ernest Hemingway's first wife. Whatever.
This time, I was wrong. The Paris Wife by Paula McLain is a gorgeous book, evoking both Hemingway and Richardson with extraordinary clarity and empathy. It is a novelised recreation of Richardson's life with Hemingway and their son, told through Richardson's eyes. Combining fact and fiction is more dangerous than mixing drinks, but McLain pulls it off so well I soon forgot to wonder whether I was reading one or the other – I was too engrossed to fret about such distinctions. Best of all, McLain never gets distracted by the glamorous people who enter the Hemingways' social circle, such as the Fitzgeralds, Ezra Pounds, and so on. If anything, she presents them as what they undoubtedly were: sirens that would imperil a happy marriage. McLain knows, as Richardson did, that a good marriage is so much more interesting than celebrity ephemerality and focuses accordingly. Hemingway realised this too late. "I wished I had died before I loved anyone but her," he wrote in A Moveable Feast.
When I read A Moveable Feast, I railed at Hemingway for being blinded by his own narcissism, but The Paris Wife showed me that my view of Richardson was no clearer than his had been. How could I want to be named after any of Hemingway's wives other than the first? She was the only one who married him before he was The Famous Ernest Hemingway. She just married a man she loved, broke and unknown. "I got the very best of him," 'Hadley' says in The Paris Wife.
Encouraged by The Paris Wife, I read another book featuring Ernest and Hadley Hemingway: Sara and Gerald: Villa America and After, a biography of Gerald and Sara Murphy, a fame-dazzled American couple on whom Fitzgerald modelled Dick and Nicole Diver from Tender Is the Night. The Murphys had an inner divining rod for spotting future celebrities and, inevitably, they scooped up the Hemingways.
Richardson is not presented kindly in this book, possibly because it was written by the Murphys' daughter, Honoria Murphy Donnelly. Her parents seemed to see Hadley as I once did: a dull appendage, a pale smudge next to Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Picasso and the rest of the Murphys', ahem, larger-than-life friends. According to Hemingway in A Moveable Feast, the Murphys advised him to leave Richardson for the more starry Pauline.
And yet, despite the pro-Murphy prism through which Donnelly writes this book, Hadley emerges as clearly the best of that lot. All of the others are shown trying to dazzle one another with their bravado and fame, while Richardson remains utterly herself, unaffected, quiet and human.
After Hemingway, Richardson found love and contentment with her second husband, Paul Mowrer, a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist, and the two were married for nearly 40 years until Mowrer's death in 1971. She died eight years later. When asked in a rare interview if she was ever tempted to return to the famous friends she knew when she was Mrs Hemingway, Richardson simply said: "No. I think I wanted something real." Most of those she left behind in Paris – Hemingway, the Fitzgeralds, the Murphys – did not want that and had less happy lives.
Richardson was the epitome of the most famous sentence George Eliot ever wrote, the last line in Middlemarch: "The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that the things that are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs."
Richardson's tomb in New Hampshire is not, I hope, unvisited. But she lived a hidden life; one that was, by all accounts, faithful, good and, most of all, happy. That's the best kind of person to be named after.
The Paris Wife by Paula McLain is published by Virago (£12.99). To order a copy, visit the Guardian bookshop