Grace Hall Hemingway — A Life: Origins

Singer, Musician, Composer, Artist, Suffragist, and Ernest Hemingway’s Mother

Grace Hall Hemingway, with husband Clarence, and Ernest (centre), plus two of his two sisters. Image: The Boston Globe/JFK Library

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.

Ernest Hall with grandchildren (Ernest on his right). Image: palinstravels.co.uk

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…