Wait, can we keep talking about Hemingway & The Sun Also Rises ?

By cosmosharbor41

A while back I saw a discussion thread get taken down because the OP asked what women thought about *The Old Man and the Sea*. Kinda a bummer, because the convo was finally getting into *The Sun Also Rises* too. That thread fizzled out quick, but now I’m honestly wondering what male vs female readers thought of *Sun Also*. When I’ve brought it up here before, the reactions weren’t super brutal. A lot of people seemed to feel for the characters, like there’s some real empathy there. I personally felt pretty bad for Robert especially—he gets it the worst, and then there’s that obvious antisemitism other characters throw at him. But I’m not sure where Lady Ashley fits into all that. I keep thinking she has a lot in common with those three guys who are all taken with her—kinda lost/aimless, but at the same time desperate for some kind of passion to shake them out of their rut. And they live this comfy expat life in Paris, bouncing around from place to place, trying to keep the mood going. They come off like they’re being romantically selfish, and they toss people aside, and then surprise, surprise, they get wrecked by other people who don’t want them anymore. Then they act like they can’t figure out why it ends like that. The “romantic selfish” thing honestly feels very on-brand for Hemingway too. Like he basically turned a vacation into a story where he was lusting after a married woman while his wife was there, and then he sort of edits his wife out of the book… which is just… oof. With Lady Ashley, you can kinda remove the war stuff and the anger problem you see in the men, she’s more carefree. Also she plays that “Helen of Troy” role where the men revolve around her. But other than that, I always felt like she’s still stuck in the same loop—this lonely aimlessness that never really resolves. And it ends the same way for everyone: sad, restless, and alone. I’ve noticed online people get pretty heated about her, though. Like they’re harsher than they are about some of the guys. Which makes me wonder if her being a woman has something to do with it, but I’m not sure. If you’ve read it, what do you think?