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Mary Todd Lincoln: A Biography, Jean H Baker, W W Norton, 1987, 369 pp
I read this for one of my reading groups. I was looking forward to reading it but it is written in a scholarly tone, which made it difficult to get through even 40 pages in a day.
I did learn more than I knew before about Abraham Lincoln's wife but my attachment to this much maligned First Lady was born when I read the historical novel Love Is Eternal by Irving Stone, the #3 bestseller of 1954. That novel brought her alive.
Baker applied psychology as it was understood in the 1980s and attempted to explain Mary's emotional states and obsessions by calling her a narcissist. I did not totally buy that. Life was violent in early 1860s Kentucky where she was raised. She lost her mother at a young age and later lost three of her four children to illnesses for which there was not workable medicine. Then she lost Abe. That makes a grieving woman, not a narcissist.
She single handedly created the role of First Lady as we see it to this day. She was a victim of some dastardly patriarchal males, simply because she was outgoing and got stuff done. So what if she liked to go shopping? She turned the White House into the showplace it needed to be for a President and world leader. She was the original shopaholic and would be showered with acclaim in today's world. Her remaining son had her committed to an insane asylum on the grounds that she could not handle her finances, even though she made do despite being denied the pension she should have had for the widow of the man who preserved the Union. Good God!
(Mary Todd Lincoln is available in paperback by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)
I've always felt a great empathy for Mary Todd Lincoln. What that woman suffered! And seemingly those around her had very little understanding of that or of her. Her life was a tragedy worthy of Shakespeare.
ReplyDeleteWell put Dorothy. If you haven't read Love Is Eternal, I think you would enjoy it.
DeleteHow sad! Perhaps reading Love Is Eternal is in order.
ReplyDeleteYes, the novel is much more sympathetic to Mary and portrays the great love they had.
DeleteI don't know what to believe about Mary. She suffered a lot of loss for sure. Was she unbalanced after what she endured? Or is she just typecast as that?
ReplyDeleteWell we will never know for sure because we weren't there and these writers take what they can from the evidence she and others left. But you know, they did like to label women as hysterical back then and sometimes they still do now.
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