Mary, Mrs. A. Lincoln: A Novel

Fascinating novel with much reality of truth. The overlap of the era of history tied it all together. I was able to gleam much about pre and post Civil War through the story of one historical figure.

This was a compelling but sad story..I am very glad I read it. Life and people can be very cruel sometimes.

I started it so I finished it. It was depressing, frustrating and I just couldn't figure out the point. Just TMI about a US President and a First Lady's sexual life.However, it did a great job of reminding people that think nothing has changed that the rights of women have come a long way. Mary most likely suffered extreme PTS after the death of her mother, husband and sons. And I think I'd go mad if men would not allow me or credit me for having my own brain and will. So there was that.

This is a marvelous journey through the life of Mary Todd Lincoln. Utterly extraordinary what the desire to be loved made of her life.

I found the character Mary to be shallow and undimensional. Surely there was more to her than sexual needs, too much shopping and petting her younger sons.

It is always difficult to write a story about people most readers have opinions about. In "Mary," the fictional portrait of Mary Todd Lincoln, Janis Cooke Newman has done just that. Moreover, her novel is more than just another book. In addition to an incredible command of the period with its complicated issues, author Newman has also mastered the nature of the human heart and mind.Using the device of Mary's commitment to Bellevue Place, a Lunatic Asylum, this first person tale takes us deep inside the mind and emotions of this famous first lady, the daugher of a wealthy abolitionist family in the south before the civil war. The hideousness of women committed to "Lunatic Asylums" is described and Ms. Newman doesn't spare the reader descriptions of the crying and shrieking, hunger strikes and forced feeding, self immolation and suicide, etc.In the Center of the Action in the boisterous turmoil of the middle of the 19th century, Mary is portrayed forcing herself into political discussions when women were decidedly not welcome. This is not to say that she was particularly successful -- she was not; but author Newman paints the portrait of an unusual woman of her times, warts and all. "Mary" takes us inside "the big tent" as it were; we're present at the Lincoln-Douglas debates, the ferocious struggle of abolitionist and pro-slavery forces, industrial north against agrarian south. And we're there alongside the most powerful person in the new world, Abe Lincoln. We watch the way the Lincolns are shunned by polite "society", and Mary's dangerous spending addiction. A meticulous craftsperson, writer Newman helps us feel Mary and Abraham Lincoln's role as man and wife during a perilous historical period, the manic depression (today we'd call it bi-polar) cycles of both while they witness the death of their children. Finally, Newman takes us into the box at the Ford theater when Mary Todd Lincoln's husband is shot and killed.In the novelist venue, I found the tone of late Victorian English exactly right, "le mot juste", the perfect voice of this book - never cloying or exaggerated or wandering into contemporary expression. Her uncanny control of this voice goes a long way to provide authenticity, and it is supported, as but one example, by her description of women's (and men's) clothing and in the case of women what it felt like to be enshrouded in the costumes of the day."Mary" is a big book, big in physical size, 620 pages, as well as scope for it allows author Newman to peel back the most intimate details of a many-layered onion, the complicated woman who was Mary Todd Lincoln. While recent decades have seemed to ask and answer questions of base motives of the rich and famous, this fictional account is almost embarrassing in its revelations, only one of which was the financial profligacy of Mary Todd Lincoln's overspending of White House Operation budgets -- but the extent of her continual complulsive collecting of silver and jewels is less well known. Likewise, not as often reported is her sexual appetite -- these and other "eccentricities" are shown in author Newman's magical novel, "Mary."In spite of its size, you won't be able to put this big book down from start to finish, cover to cover. And you'll never be the same after you've read this spectacular story of American history and arguably its most famous couple.

I could not put this book down. I read a lot of non-fiction history, and am fairly familiar with Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War. But Mary Todd Lincoln, other than being generally being dismissed as a mother who let her children run wild in the White House and a spendthrift, has always been a poorly defined character. Newman's imaginings give context to the life the history books touch on so lightly. Newman's Mary is emotionally sensitive and desparate to be loved since the early death of her mother. American society was clear about what was the proper expression of love - a lesson Mary never learns and that, more than anything, is the motivation for her actions. Society's boundaries are magnified by the inability of son Robert to find a place for love. Seances and belief in the power of 'things' to affect human fate come from a childhood with slaves who believe in 'hoodo' and conjure. The 'madness' that comes after everyone she loved and was loved by dies may be the result of a deranged mind. Or it may be the result of the interaction of too many drugs prescibed by doctors who define female sanity as docility and invested endless lists of Ladies' Tonics filled with opiates and alcohal--the drug culture of the well dressed. This Mary Todd Lincoln does not consider (at least not deeply) that the rules may be wrong: rationally she accepts what her spirit cannot obey. Mary has no intellectual life (and is discouraged from one) so that the emotional life is the only place for her energy.Aside from the well written and very compelling character study, Janis Newman has written insightfully of women of the 17th century. Functioning entirely as appendages of men, their thoughts and behavior were regulated by each other meet an ideal of companionship. That ideal meant a woman had no place in serious conversations, family ambition (and even less of personal ambition)or in making direct decisions. You may already have read of the 'place' of women, their lack of direct rights and personal freedom, the strictures on behavior and the Victorian fear of sexuality. In this book, Newman makes those things real and experienced by the reader. She speculates what the result would be of a unconsidered rebellion. And she manages to do it without making it a polemic.As for those who complain that Abe Lincoln is too shadowy --well, it is not his book. But if Janis Newman wrote his story as well, I would read it immediately.

Exactly as described.

Engaging read....brings Mary to life and helps understand how her addiction issues were tied to womens' issues at the time.