hempem's Full Review: Catherine Clinton - Mrs. Lincoln: A Life
I have discovered a new way to find book recommendations. Watching Book TV on C-SPAN2. The authors themselves give lectures on their books, answer questions from the audience, and I discovered this completely by accident while staying up all night and being bored. Channel surfing CAN be productive!
Before taking a trip that would require a long flight on an airplane, I saw Catherine Clinton discussing her new book, "Mrs. Lincoln: A Life" at some ungodly hour of the night. I was so intrigued that the next morning I did something unheard of for an avid Amazon.com book buyer and seller like myself . . . I paid FULL PRICE (close to $25.00) for this book at the airport bookstore. I shudder to think of it, as hardcover copies are now selling at Amazon.com for under $3.00.
However, I relished every page of the intriguing and very personal look into the First Lady and First Widow of our country, and like a fine wine I took my time, reading it at several different airports and eventually a chapter each night at my vacation destination.
Much has been written about Mary Todd Lincoln. But in Catherine Clinton's well-researched book, one gets such a strong sense of who the woman was that history becomes very real, and seems very recent.
I knew very little about Mary Lincoln. My perception was that she was possibly mad, and that she was a source of grief to Abraham Lincoln, who patiently tolerated her growing insanity, and was a burden to an already burdened man.
But the historical reality was far less black and white. Mary Todd Lincoln was from the South, highly educated, refined, and used to the finer things in life. Clinton discusses things such as the probability that she was exposed to slavery's cruelties as a child; the facts about her courtship with Lincoln in which some have said he was in love with a different young lady, but entrapped into marriage with Mary, his second choice. Their early marriage lodgings and the duties of being a wife are outlined specifically, giving a new meaning to all the hard work she would have faced on a daily basis.
Mary Lincoln was the first Presidential wife to be called "First Lady" and of course, the first woman to lose her husband and become the First widow while in the White House. She lost children and her one remaining son Robert had her placed in an insane asylum years after she left the White House. Of course she was sane enough to perceive this as the ultimate betrayal that it was, and she struggled with being villainized by the press of her day for trying to sell her collection of dresses for ready cash, as well as having to badger Congress for her pension. She was constantly worried about money.
I found it difficult to read about her life. She was high-strung and her sensitivity was painful to recognize - the fact that she was so fragile in many ways and yet had to suffer all that she did brings home the statement, "Life isn't fair." I felt sad for several days after finishing the book. Her life was a full one, and Clinton outlines her travels to Europe both before and after her Asylum experience, courted by nobles and treated with the respect she craved. The question of her psychiatric health was more clearly explained, although I discovered that it was Abraham Lincoln that actually suffered from classic and deep depressions, not his wife. She was more of what perhaps was called a "histrionic" personality back in her time. She was also perhaps given to mania and her shopping sprees seemed uncontrollable and created massive debt along with alternating periods of madly pinching pennies and obsession over what she had done. I do believe it was fairly clear she suffered some sort of nervous breakdown before admittance to the Asylum. Catherine Clinton covered very thoroughly the details of the entire episode of Mary Lincoln's admission to the asylum against her will, and the reasons why Robert did what he felt was a necessity. But I was left feeling as if perhaps both parties were wrong.
Knowing that Mary Lincoln was feeling everything in life at such a heightened level really emphasized to me the tragedy of all she experienced, and I confess I was a bit relieved to sell the book for a third of what I paid for it on Amazon.com a week after reading it. Perhaps the refinement and mental illness of my own mother drew too close a connection. The book itself is very well written, easy to read, and thoroughly researched (with notations at the end). I certainly recommend it highly to a reader with more objectivity.
Catherine Clinton has done a marvelous and thorough job in painting a full portrait of Mrs. Lincoln in a very objective way, based on documentation and lacking sentimentality or apparent bias. Definitely a must read, but for the overly empathetic, a difficult one.
In this remarkable book, Catherine Clinton displays an emotional depth in her understanding of Mary Lincoln that has rarely been revealed in the Linco...More at Buy.com
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