Holly Kyte reviews Mrs Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln's wife
Holly Kyte reviews Mrs Lincoln by Janis Cooke Newman 

She was the original First Lady; the intelligent, determined wife of America's 'Martyred President' Abraham Lincoln. She was also a coquettish, extravagant and superstitious Southern belle who, thanks to her scandalous and 'unwomanly' behaviour, was publicly reviled and consigned to the madhouse by her own son. Mary Todd Lincoln's life was truly the stuff of novels and, in this ambitious debut, Janis Cooke Newman takes the logical step of writing it as such.

The book takes the form of a fictional memoir which the widowed Mrs Lincoln pens from Bellevue Place Sanatorium, where she was committed after an insanity trial in 1875. Amid the caterwauling of her fellow inmates, she relates her 'true story', alternating between her present efforts to escape bedlam and the key events in her past: her mother's early death, a turbulent courtship with the 'homely' Abraham, his political success at her instigation, the Civil War, the Emancipation Proclamation, the deaths of three beloved sons and, of course, her husband's assassination as he sat beside her in the theatre.

It is a long, sombre tale, but this epic drama exerts an irresistible pull, chiefly because it boasts such a riveting and well-drawn heroine. Candid, self-aware and compellingly flawed, Mary Lincoln acknowledges a raft of irrational behaviour that includes exorbitant spending, reckless adultery and an increasing reliance on spiritualism. But given the mitigating circumstances of her extraordinary life and the lucidity of her account, it's hard to read this as the confessions of a lunatic.

This is puritanical 19th-century America after all. The so-called 'madness' that seeps through the narrative is simply another word for 'unseemly' female passion - something that is feared, loathed and curbed by the men in the novel. As a memoir, Mrs Lincoln is Mary's personal testimony to prove (to herself more than anyone) that she is not deranged. As a novel, it's an impressive, engrossing and moving piece of historical imagining and characterisation, which is given weight and authenticity by Newman's dedicated research as well as her evident affection for a woman who she believes was locked up simply for loving too much.