When F. Scott Fitzgerald commented to Hemingway that Catherine Barkley in A Farewell to Arms is less successful than some of the women from his early short stories, he showed again his acute literary judgment. As Fitzgerald phrases it, "in the stories you were really listening to women—here you're only listening to yourself." Whatever the reason for the distancing that was to mar Hemingway's portrayal of women characters from 1929 on (except for Pilar, Maria, and Marie Morgan), there is little question that Hemingway was at his most sympathetic and skillful in drawing the female leads of the short stories of In Our Time and Men Without Women and of The Sun Also Rises. (p. 239)
One of the most striking characteristics of Hemingway's women in his early fiction is their resemblance to the later, mature Hemingway hero…. [In] Hemingway's earlier stories—"Up in Michigan," "Indian Camp," "The End of Something," "The Three-Day Blow," and "Cross-Country Snow"—the women have already reached that plateau of semi-stoic self awareness which Hemingway's men have, usually, yet to attain.
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