Mr. and Mrs. Elliot

"Mr. and Mrs. Elliot" is a short story written by Ernest Hemingway. The story was first published in The Little Review in 1924 and republished by Boni & Liveright in Hemingway's first American volume of short stories, In Our Time, in 1925.^[1]

Ernest Hemingway in 1923

The story is about a 25-year-old Harvard student who follows a "clean" life. He marries a 40-year-old clean Southern woman in Boston and the next day they set off to Europe and they 'try very hard to have a baby'. They travel to Paris, then Dijon and finally at a chateau in Touraine. Eventually both become disenchanted with each other, and the wife's girlfriend moves in to live with her.^[1]

The story was initially titled "Mr. and Mrs. Smith" when it first appeared in The Little Review; it was reputedly based on the 1921-4 marriage of writer Chard Powers Smith and his wife Olive Macdonald.^[2] Smith resented Hemingway's story for the rest of his life.^[3]