Martha Gellhorn, one of the twentieth century’s celebrated war correspondents, a novelist and short story writer, a political activist, and Ernest Hemingway’s third wife (the only one who left him), has been an important figure in biographies and histories, some of which she attacked, some of which she ignored.

Paula McLain’s new book of historical fiction, Love and Ruin, covers much the same ground as Amanda Vaill’s well-received Hotel Florida, which focused on several couples during the Spanish Civil War. McLain begins in 1937, when Gellhorn met Hemingway in Key West, and carries her narrative into the dissolution of the Gellhorn–Hemingway marriage during World War II.

Gellhorn despised biographies of writers and never wrote an autobiography. So it is difficult to imagine, even in fiction, such a reluctant witness to her own life, going on page after page about her deepest personal feelings, especially about Ernest Hemingway, whom she grew to loathe. What kind of biographical novel could do justice to such a recalcitrant and reticent subject?

In a “Note on Sources,” McLain states “my Gellhorn isn’t theGellhorn, for how could she be? That woman is a mystery, the way we’re all mysteries, to our friends and family and loved ones, and even to ourselves.” So what is the point of biographical fiction? McLain never really makes a convincing case, so let me help her out. A novelist can try to write in the subject’s voice in a way a biographer