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punnygirl789's review
4.0
This was a very interesting read. Mary Lincoln certainly had a very difficult and traumatic life, with far more losses than any one person should have to bear.
amycrea's review
4.0
Really interesting book about a fascinating woman. I didn't know much about her, other than rumors of her being troubled. My only bone to pick with the book is the tirade the author goes on about Mary's son Robert having her institutionalized. Granted, by today's standards Mary would seem eccentric, not mentally ill, but in those days, it might have seemed quite logical. Plus he had issues of his own to deal with--father being assassinated, siblings dying young of terrible diseases, mother spending all her free time in seances, wife an alcoholic, etc. I don't know Robert's story--maybe he was a vengeful, horrible person. Might be interesting to know the other side of that story.
librarianonparade's review
4.0
History has not been kind to Mary Todd Lincoln. Whilst her husband is known to posterity as the Great Emancipator, the man who freed the slaves and steered the Union safely through four years of civil war, consistently rated as one of, if not the greatest of all American presidents, Mary Lincoln is remembered as a bad-tempered, irrational, shrewish 'hellcat', in the words of her husband's secretaries. Her own reputation seems to hang in inverse proportion to her husband's - as his rises so correspondingly hers declines. She was not worthy of such a man, history records.
History, as Jean Baker writes in this sympathetic, psychological portrait of Mary Lincoln, has been not only unkind but unfair. Whilst not whitewashing Mary's flaws and faults, which as with any human were numerous, she portrays her as a woman ahead of her time, a woman caught between her own impulses for independence, notice, involvement, and her beliefs in the prevailing societal mores of her time which dictated that women should concern themselves only with domestic affairs, with home and husband and children. Mary was an intelligent, well-read woman with opinions and interest in the vital affairs of state, and it is entirely possible that without her burning ambition and belief in her husband, Abraham Lincoln may have never been more than a state legislator known for aww-shucks stories and a well-polished turn of phrase on the stump.
Mary was a deeply-conflicted woman, scarred by loss and abandonment issues through her life, with complicated psychological impulses that motivated her craving for visibility, recognition and notice in an era when admirable women were seen and not heard. Her desperate urge for love and affection redirected itself into compulsive shopping, jealousy of her standing and position, craving attention yet recoiling and lashing out when that attention was not always positive. Mary Lincoln would have been far happier in an era when the President's wife could genuinely be a partner and helpmate, rather than a decorative ornament and hostess.
I have read widely on Abraham Lincoln and the American Civil War, and this is the first book I have come across that attempted to be fair to Mary Lincoln, or to at least understand her. This isn't a hagiography, and Mary Lincoln is a hard character to love. But reading this book, it is hard not to feel some sympathy for a woman who lost her mother at a young age, was replaced in her father's affections by a stepmother and a new family, lost three of her four children, saw her extended family split on both sides of the Civil War, saw her husband murdered in front of her, suffered the agony and humiliation of her sole surviving child committing her falsely to an insane asylum, was traduced and vilified in the press, hounded out of America and ended up in solitary exile on the Continent. Mary Lincoln, Baker seems to feel, has deserved better from history.
History, as Jean Baker writes in this sympathetic, psychological portrait of Mary Lincoln, has been not only unkind but unfair. Whilst not whitewashing Mary's flaws and faults, which as with any human were numerous, she portrays her as a woman ahead of her time, a woman caught between her own impulses for independence, notice, involvement, and her beliefs in the prevailing societal mores of her time which dictated that women should concern themselves only with domestic affairs, with home and husband and children. Mary was an intelligent, well-read woman with opinions and interest in the vital affairs of state, and it is entirely possible that without her burning ambition and belief in her husband, Abraham Lincoln may have never been more than a state legislator known for aww-shucks stories and a well-polished turn of phrase on the stump.
Mary was a deeply-conflicted woman, scarred by loss and abandonment issues through her life, with complicated psychological impulses that motivated her craving for visibility, recognition and notice in an era when admirable women were seen and not heard. Her desperate urge for love and affection redirected itself into compulsive shopping, jealousy of her standing and position, craving attention yet recoiling and lashing out when that attention was not always positive. Mary Lincoln would have been far happier in an era when the President's wife could genuinely be a partner and helpmate, rather than a decorative ornament and hostess.
I have read widely on Abraham Lincoln and the American Civil War, and this is the first book I have come across that attempted to be fair to Mary Lincoln, or to at least understand her. This isn't a hagiography, and Mary Lincoln is a hard character to love. But reading this book, it is hard not to feel some sympathy for a woman who lost her mother at a young age, was replaced in her father's affections by a stepmother and a new family, lost three of her four children, saw her extended family split on both sides of the Civil War, saw her husband murdered in front of her, suffered the agony and humiliation of her sole surviving child committing her falsely to an insane asylum, was traduced and vilified in the press, hounded out of America and ended up in solitary exile on the Continent. Mary Lincoln, Baker seems to feel, has deserved better from history.
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