Brett Ashley

[Lillian]

Lady Brett Ashly is, in my opinion, one of the best characters of all time. I would be interested to hear other people's thoughts on her, her personality, or really anything to do with "The Sun Also Rises". ERNEST HEMINGWAY ROCKS!!!

[Erin *Proud Book Hoarder*]

I didn't like her personally. I found nothing special about her and saw she caused a lot of trouble and tension for men who did like her.

[Joshua]

I was more in the dislike camp. TSAR was an amazing book, I really did love it, but Lady Ashley represented, at least to me, the epitome of a woman generously adorned with men's attention but a mirage for true security in love and relationship. She came across as a woman who really has absolutely nothing figured out and therefore doesn't have a clue what she wants, and thus a trail of men's corpses lay as clues for the more observant.

[Sammi]

I liked her, she had that "man-eater" personality, she reminded me of my best friend.

[Michael]

A great book about boys turning into men. Young men in their '20s fishing, fighting, dancing, touring and joking. Figuring out who they are, what they like, what they don't, who they can get on with, who is 'on a different cruiser,' heading in a different direction like ships in the night. How to behave, and exercising their judgment and understanding of people. Hemmingway's heroes usually have very good understanding of people -- well, other men anyway, not necessarily of women.

Brett Ashley was that type of woman who liked boys. To her they were just the most amazing and fascinating creatures. But behind that the sort of high-expectations, high-maintenance, wont settle for less than perfection, and fine-grained detailed critique which is bound to wind up disappointed ultimately.

If you grow up believing that you can have it all, boys will all bow down to you, and all you have to do is marry the perfect man and everything will be happy ever after, then you are setting yourself up for some major-league depression in your '30s. I knew some Grammar School girls like that in my '20s: Loads of fun, but many of them had severe mental problems in middle-age.

A great and accomplished book to read as a young man. And again as an old man. I believe that Hemmingway developed this theme as he himself matured, through A Farewell To Arms, For Whom The Bell Tolls, and culminating in The Garden of Eden. By the time he got to the end the plusses and minuses of 'the Hemmingway woman' were pretty well drawn, and most of his wives fitted the category too.

[Monty J]

AnneGordon wrote: "She seems like the flame to their moths but she is a mess. For me she represents the curse of constant yearning for an idea or an imagined state . Cohn and Mike and Jake, to a lesser extent ,look t..."

As revealed here under the caption "Background," (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sun...), Ashley is based on someone EH knew, Lady Duff Twysdon, who was part of a group who joined the Hemingways in Pamplona one summer for the bullfights and behaved badly. The novel is a roman a clef based on that riotous excursion into decadence. Cohn is based on Harold Loeb, etc.

This excursion to Pamplona is examined in some detail in Paula McClain's historical novel, The Paris Wife.

Duff was recently divorced, and her sexual promiscuity, typically a temporary syndrome, is not uncommon for recent divorcees of either gender.

[Monty J]

AnneGordon wrote: "I'm afraid as regards reading literature I concern myself only with what's in the book, on the page."

A good policy. Mine as well, for the initial reading's personal impact. And no two views need be the same.

But I am sometimes later curious at the multitude of ways a book, or parts of it, are interpreted. So in order to understand other views I search for external clues.

For example, Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby deals with similar themes of forbidden romance and corruption involving Americans during the same period of history, the early 1920s, at a time when the two authors were close friends in the same locale, Paris. Thirty years later Hemingway wrote a memoir that dealt with their Paris relationship and also contained Hemingway's reaction to The Great Gatsby, published a year before TSAR.

Mind-stretching insights invariably come to light when one's curiosity is piqued.