I recently read Hemingway's posthumous novel The Garden of Eden, and was frankly pretty surprised by the explorations of queer relationships and gender expression throughout. In a nutshell, the novel is about a woman, Catherine, who wishes to be a boy despite her husband, David, by and large wishing otherwise. Throughout the story, it becomes clearer and clearer that David is not opposed to her being a boy - rather, that he is opposed to being married to one. That doesn't stop him from letting her essentially force femme him in a number of scenes, which is wild and unexpected. The proceed to get involved in a love-triangle-turned-polycule with Marita, someone that Catherine met in Biarritz (if I remember correctly). What astonished me most about this story, though, was the way the characters all felt like aspects of Hemingway the man - something that definitely pops up in his other works (the final stream of consciousness in To Have and Have Not comes to mind), but tends to fall to the wayside in favour of the hypermasculine machismo he's so famous for. Having nuanced women be just as engaging and interesting throughout the story as his Hemingway Hero(tm), especially queer women, makes the story inhabit a very different space than his other novels I've read. I got the sense throughout the story that, since it heavily involves the writing process and a story within a story, Catherine and David both are representative of his relationship with the writing process. Catherine, who is so hostile to it, could even be seen as an aspect of his psyche that is fundamentally opposed to the creation of his works (which 100% could be read as misogynistic, by the way). She is rude and eventually very aggressive and damaging to David when he abandons his major project for other side stories he wanted to write, but simultaneously is the mechanism by which his writing is accomplished. Marita serves more as a distraction to the works he is "supposed" to be writing, allowing him to explore stories he needed to write for personal growth but likely would not make him as much money/be reviewed as well. Due to this, it is not out of the question (in my opinion) to suggest a sort of reversal of gendered expectations - David betrays the stoic, suffering breadwinner trope that Hemingway is so famous for by relying on Catherine for funding and publishing. Her gender exploration forces David into a feminised role that aligns very similarly to Jake in The Sun Also Rises, albeit with more nuance and contentment on David's part. He is not emasculated as Jake was, but rather he is softened. This role reversal, especially taking the gender-fuckery sex scenes into account, calls into question Hemingway's understandings of masculinity and gender as a whole. To clarify, I don't think this is some revolutionary book about trans modernists, or even ultimately about trans characters. However, the use of queerness as a tool through which to examine his artistic process and the undeniable presence of Hemingway in every character in the story gives me cause to reinvestigate many of the hyper-gendered stories he has written through a new lens.