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Grace Hall Hemingway — A Life: Origins
Singer, Musician, Composer, Artist, Suffragist, and Ernest Hemingway’s Mother
Although Ernest Hemingway and his mother, Grace, were at daggers-drawn for most of their lives, there can be no doubt that Ernest Hemingway, the most influential of 20th century writers, would have been as nothing without his hugely talented, strong willed, and forthright mother.
As Bernice Kert has written in The Hemingway Women, quoting Hemingway’s younger sister, Carol:
“ ‘ My mother was very much an English gentlewoman…she liked to be waited on and expected her children to be well behaved. She thought of us as English as well, though of course we were all born in Oak Park.’ ”
As I have written previously, although Grace’s origins are English, her temperament was Yorkshire through and through. Her father, Ernest Hall, born in Sheffield in 1840 who, as a teenager worked for the family cutlery business before emigrating to America, where he took up farming.
Kert goes on to write:
Grace’s mother was the daughter of a widowed sea captain who took his three children around the world on his cargo ship before finally setting down roots in Dyersville, Iowa.”
And it would be in Dyersville that Caroline met and married Ernest Hall, who had served bravely in the Civil War as a corporal with L Troop of the First Iowa Volunteer Cavalry, with whom he was injured stopping a Confederate rifle ball in his thigh.
After his marriage, and refusing a disability pension, Hall, with his new bride, headed to Chicago and the extended family wholesale cutlery business, where he quickly prospered.
Grace was born just nine months after the great fire of Chicago, on June 15, 1872 in a pleasant clapboard house in Oakley Avenue — their previous house had burned down.
As Kert writes, Ernest Hall:
“ …hired servants for his wife, and cultivated a life of travel and leisure. He taught Grace to play billiards and they played together every morning on the family billiard table. Impeccably turned…
