Isn’t it pretty to think so?
Lady Duff Twysden was born Mary Smurthwaite, and acquired her title through marriage. Ernest Hemingway fell for her in the winter of 1924. The following summer, he and his wife joined the Lady Twysden and a few other close friends for a holiday vacation in Spain. The trip did not go as Hemingway hoped—it was revealed that earlier, the hard-drinking, man-eating Twysden had slept with another man on the trip named Harold Loeb. Hemingway drank heavily the rest of the trip, published The Sun Also Rises the following year, and divorced his wife a year after that.
The first lines he wrote that began to give the novel its shape were about Twysden; “she still had a certain wonderful vitality.” When the book was released, the expatriate community in Paris rushed to read it so they could gossip about which real life people were portrayed in the book. None doubted that Twysden was Brett.
This is a picture of them seated around a cafe table during that vacation. Hemingway is the mustached man on the left, sitting between Lady Twysden and Harold Loeb. His wife is seated across the table.
