Mary: A Novel [Hardcover]

Janis Cooke Newman (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 8, 2006

An engrossing novel about politics, love, war, and one of history’s most misunderstood and enigmatic women. Writing from Bellevue asylum – where the dream shrieks of the other inmates keep her awake at night – a famous widower shares the story of her life, finally in her own words. From Mary’s tempestuous childhood in a slave-holding Southern family through the opium-clouded years after her husband’s death, we are let into the inner, intimate world of this brave and fascinating woman.

Intelligent, unconventional, and – some thought – mad, she held Spiritualist séances in the White House, ran her family into debt with compulsive shopping, negotiated with conniving politicians, and raised her young sons in the nation’s capital during the bloodiest war this country has ever known. She was also a political strategist, a comfort to wounded soldiers, a supporter of emancipation, the country’s first First Lady, and a wife and mother who survived the loss of three children and the assassination of her beloved husband.

Interwoven with her history, Mary describes life in the asylum, where the treatment for lunacy is bland food, cold baths, and the near-lethal doses of chloral hydrate. In these sections, Mary introduces us to her friend, the anorectic, Minnie Judd, who is starving herself to win the affection of her beautiful husband; and to Myra Bradwell, the suffragist and lady lawyer who helps Mary gain her freedom.

An engrossing mix of fact and fiction, and a dramatic tale filled with passion and depression, poverty and ridicule, infidelity and redemption: this is the unforgettable story of Mary Todd Lincoln.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Mary is a novel written in the first person, comprised of notes composed by Mary Todd Lincoln when she was an inmate of a lunatic asylum. She takes up her pen to block out the screams and moans of the other inmates and to save her own sanity. According to these notes, although she held séances in the White House and drove her family deeply into debt because of compulsive shopping, she was perfectly sane. She makes a good case for herself, despite occasional manic behavior and often uncontrollable grief.

Mary was born to southern slaveholders in Kentucky, moved to Illinois when she was 20 to live with her sister and met Abe at a cotillion. His opening line was "Miss Todd, I want to dance with you the worst way." Their relationship was odd, to say the least. Lincoln, as portrayed by Janis Cooke Newman, was sexually repressed and feared Mary's passion. She was in an almost constant state of trying to seduce him, usually without success. Despite his gawky, angular, unlovely looks, she adored him--even when she had an affair with another to defuse some of her heat. How much of the bedroom scene is fact and how much fancy must be left to the reader to decide, but it does give credence to Mary's very forward manner and her later "passionate" approach to shopping.

She used her shopping expeditions to accumulate things that would "protect" her family--and finally herself, when she felt her son Robert's growing disapproval of her. In his statement to the "insanity" lawyer, Robert said, "I have no doubt my mother is insane. She has long been a source of great anxiety to me. She has no home and no reason to make these purchases." Mary saw them as talismans against disaster, and she certainly had suffered disasters in abundance. She buried three sons and was holding her husband's hand when he was assassinated by a bullet to the head. Her eldest son, Robert, was a cold, unfeeling, haughty shell of a man to whom Mary did not speak after she was released from the asylum to her sister's care. She spent four years in Europe and, when her health failed, returned to her sister's house, where she received her son once before she died.

"First Lady" is a term that was coined to describe Mary Todd Lincoln, while she was the President's wife. It was meant as a backhanded compliment, because she was front and center during much of Lincoln's term. Presidential wives usually stuck to their knitting, but not Mary. Her unconventional ways did her husband a great deal of good; indeed, it was her ambition for him that finally ignited his own ambition. She also helped him to become a great orator. Ultimately, her "unsexed" manner contributed to her being judged insane in 1865 and committed to Bellevue Place, an asylum in Batavia, Illinois, outside Chicago. No President has been more praised nor any first lady more vilified than Abraham and Mary Lincoln. Janis Cooke Newman brings a time, a place and a person to life in a wholly believable and compelling manner. --Valerie Ryan

From Publishers Weekly

Abraham Lincoln's widow was committed by her son in 1875; kept awake by the bedlam of her fellow inmates, she takes up a pen. Newman, author of the memoir The Russian Word for Snow, portrays Mary Todd Lincoln (1818– 1882) as a proto-feminist: she seduces poor Illinois lawyer Lincoln; kick-starts his career; draws his attention to the slavery issue; corrects his elocution before the Lincoln-Douglas debates; and lobbies behind the scenes (she also has an affair). After the 1860 election, the narrative returns to accepted history, dominated by Mary's crushing misery after a son's death in 1862, her husband's assassination and another son's death in 1872, punctuated by lavish shopping expeditions and an occasional psychotic break. Not introspective and demonstrative, Mary presents a challenge for any historical novelist. Newman makes a good choice in telling the story through Mary's eyes and drawing readers into her perspective. Lincoln buffs can give this a pass because he comes across as a shadowy figure, but readers looking for a vivid, mostly flattering (and rather massive) account of his once-notorious spouse, whose letters are becoming more read, will not be disappointed—and those who simply come upon it will be happily surprised. (Sept. 8)
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Product Details

• Hardcover: 707 pages
• Publisher: MacAdam/Cage; First Ed. 1st Printing edition (September 8, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 193156163X
• ISBN-13: 978-1931561631
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 2.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (55 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #105,827 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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56 of 57 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Terrific Historical Novel, September 22, 2006

By 

Candace "thepageturner" (Los Angeles, CA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Mary: A Novel (Hardcover)

Janis Cooke Newman's novel is should please lovers of historical fiction as well as Lincoln aficionados, women's history readers, and civil war buffs. It is a cracking good read; rich in detail, engrossing, and an interesting take on an historical figure who continues to be controversial. Like Margaret George's "Autobiography of Henry VIII"--another great example of looking at familiar events through the eyes of its often-maligned main character--Newman allows Mary Todd Lincoln writes her own story, this time from the asylum where her son Robert has committed her.

Like so many 19th century women, Mary had more physical desire than she was supposed to, and was starved for affection on top of it. Her losses were staggering--three sons dead, a husband shot to death while sitting next to her at Ford's Theater, and betrayal by a beloved friend---but while we might say that this would be enough to unbalance anyone, the 19th century was not so forgiving. Many women experienced this depth of loss and were expected to just get on with it. Mary could not.

Her "appetites" for love and shopping (her desire to improve the look for the dirty, seedy White House and the resulting shopping sprees in New York) lead to debts and scandal. She believed that things would keep her and her family safe. She was not loved by the nation, nor by her only surviving son, Robert, a man born with little affection to give. But was she insane? She did lack the moderation and balance expected of women of her period. Newman's novel presents up a complex personality, someone of her time but not well suited to it. This rich and absorbing novel is highly recommended.

22 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars "Unsettled by the ten year anniversary of my husband's killing. But not deranged.", September 30, 2006

By 

Luan Gaines "luansos" (Dana Point, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Mary: A Novel (Hardcover)

A few scant years after Abraham Lincoln's assassination, his widow, Mary, passes the lonely days incarcerated at Bellevue Place Sanitarium, under the care of an arrogant physician with the usual chauvinistic prejudices of the era. The doctor announces that Mary's "bladder is hysterical" and that she is "possessed of an irritated spine." Later he will blame her state on the "unfavorable humors of an older woman's womb". Subject to the determination of the doctor and her eldest son that she is restored to reason, Mary, at fifty-six, knows only that she must please them to hope of ever gaining her freedom. An easy target of the tabloid since her time as First Lady, Mrs. Lincoln has been driven, in her incarceration, to put pen to paper, filling the sleepless hours of the night with her memories, to "make me forget that I am locked in a madhouse... and keep me sane."

Beginning with her mother's death in Lexington, Kentucky, when Mary is six, she writes of a life cursed with excess and loss: her first meeting with the man who would be president; their tumultuous courtship and marriage; Lincoln's congressional career; the Civil War, the loss of three of her four sons; a long flirtation with Spiritualism; a short foray into infidelity and its consequences; the fated night at Ford's theater, the Chicago fire, years of prescribed drug therapy (chloral hydrate and laudanum) and her distressing stay at Bellevue. Notably emotional, Mary assuages her fearful insecurity during the war years with overzealous spending, a habit that brings her much grief. But aside from the events that mark the passing decades, Mary's life is suffused with an overabundance of passion, unacceptable in her position, coupled with the raging grief of her unbearable losses. Even her husband is intimidated by the strength of Mary's passion.

Her days take on nightmarish proportions after Lincoln's death, until her release from Bellevue through the offices of a Suffragette lawyer, the tale resonating with the history of a democracy still in its infancy. Most striking is the revelation of one woman's fate when she veers from what is acceptable with no man to protect her, her every move monitored by those who determine her sanity. That she survives at all is amazing. A victim of her own insecurities and the prevailing male predilection for denying female participation of any significance beyond the home, Mary is most assuredly a woman of her times, albeit a famous one. This is a telling portrait, Mary's male contemporaries suffering her excesses, importuned by a "weaker sex" desirous of equality in an unending battle of the sexes. Luan Gaines/2006.

17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A real page turner, October 11, 2006

By 

Kristin Abkemeier (Washington, DC United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Mary: A Novel (Hardcover)

I grew up in Illinois and all I ever learned was the standard party line about Mary Todd Lincoln: that she'd been committed to an insane asylum after her husband was assassinated. And that was where my knowledge stood until Janis's book came along to give a more compassionate take on why Mary might have done what she did (compulsive shopping, erratic behavior, seances, etc.)

Many of us know that Mary Todd Lincoln lost three sons as well as her husband--but history gave her a bum rap because when she didn't behave in a manner that was considered seemly for a former First Lady. With the understanding of psychology and pharmacology we have now, Mary's actions make a lot more sense to us than they did 130 years ago.

And it is the process of seeing how her actions unfolded that makes this such a page turner--though this book may seem long, it doesn't read that way at all. There is no bogging down in exposition; dialogue flows, and things happen on practically every page. I can't imagine a more compelling way to learn a little-told historical tale!