By: Jason Emerson Publisher: Southern Illinois University Press Average Rating: Binding: Hardcover Label: Southern Illinois University Press Number of Items: 1 Number of Pages: 272 Publication Date: September 25, 2007 Release Date: September 06, 2007
In 2005, historian Jason Emerson discovered a steamer trunk formerly owned by Robert Todd Lincoln's lawyer and stowed in an attic for forty years. The trunk contained a rare find: twenty-five letters pertaining to Mary Todd Lincoln's life and insanity case, letters assumed long destroyed by the Lincoln family. Mary wrote twenty of the letters herself, more than half from the insane asylum to which her son Robert had her committed, and many in the months and years after.
The Madness of Mary Lincoln is the first examination of Mary Lincoln’s mental illness based on the lost letters, and the first new interpretation of the insanity case in twenty years. This compelling story of the purported insanity of one of America’s most tragic first ladies provides new and previously unpublished materials, including the psychiatric diagnosis of Mary’s mental illness and her lost will.
Emerson charts Mary Lincoln’s mental illness throughout her life and describes how a predisposition to psychiatric illness and a life of mental and emotional trauma led to her commitment to the asylum. The first to state unequivocally that Mary Lincoln suffered from bipolar disorder, Emerson offers a psychiatric perspective on the insanity case based on consultations with psychiatrist experts.
This book reveals Abraham Lincoln’s understanding of his wife’s mental illness and the degree to which he helped keep her stable. It also traces Mary’s life after her husband’s assassination, including her severe depression and physical ailments, the harsh public criticism she endured, the Old Clothes Scandal, and the death of her son Tad.
The Madness of Mary Lincoln is the story not only of Mary, but also of Robert. It details how he dealt with his mother’s increasing irrationality and why it embarrassed his Victorian sensibilities; it explains the reasons he had his mother committed, his response to her suicide attempt, and her plot to murder him. It also shows why and how he ultimately agreed to her release from the asylum eight months early, and what their relationship was like until Mary’s death.
This historical page-turner provides readers for the first time with the lost letters that historians had been in search of for eighty years.
Important work on MTL Based partially on newly discovered Mary Lincoln letters, the work is a "must have" for those interested in the Mary Lincoln saga. It offers information I've never read before. The book is well written and quite captivating.
A page turner! I could not put this book down! The tragic story of the Lincoln family echos the sadness the seems to follow the Kennedy family: tragedy after tragedy yet still connected by unshakeable bonds of love and duty. Robert Lincoln emerges from the pages as much a tragic hero as his contemporary, Edwin Booth. Masterful story telling at its best, this tale of Mary Lincoln will linger with you long after you've finished the book.
Poor Mary Todd Lincoln.... Whether you agree or disagree with Mary Todd Lincoln's diagnoses, this book brings to light much of her suffering and pain. She did not have an easy life, and, I can relate to her son Robert's efforts to "do what was right" for his mother, while trying to maintain somewhat of a normal life for himself and his own family. I bought this book after seeing Jason Emerson review it on C-Span. An interesting book.
madnes of mary lincon the book is chock full of information about the lady but also about her lesser know role as a mother and wife. it is concise and has many unknown facts about her personal life and her social life. for people who enjoy learning the "off" parts of our countries history and it's players, this is a good read.
What an Unfortunate Woman . . . Although I have read a few books on Lincoln, I was unaware that his wife Mary was committed to an insane asylum in 1875 (ten years after her husband's assassination) by her only living child, Robert. In those days, she had to have a trial to be declared insane, and the whole matter was kept relatively private. But once committed, with Robert appointed as her conservator, Mary started agitating to be released and to resume control over her finances--she was a compulsive spender, that being part of her illness. She enlisted the aid of a brilliant couple, the Bradwells, with Mr. being a judge and Mrs. having been trained as a lawyer who was not admitted to the bar because she was a woman. They took up her cause and went to the press, eventually forcing her premature release into the care of her sister in Illinois. But Mary was not a well woman; she made a suicide attempt when her trial was just over and later acquired a pistol and was threatening to kill Robert. By today's standards, she was clearly "a threat to self and others" when she was committed and even after her release.
In the publicity that ensued, there was controversy over whether Robert was a loving son who had done his best to obtain the highest possible care for his mother or an avaricious heir who wanted to seize control over her and her money. Emerson goes to primary sources and does a beautiful job of proving the former, portraying Robert as a Victorian man to whom the idea of "duty" was paramount, despite great personal cost to himself. He returned her finances back to Mary, $8K to the good, which was a huge sum of money in those days. And he permitted her release to appease her, ever knowing that should something catastrophic occur, all responsibility and liability for that would rest on his shoulders.
But, to me as a psychologist, the best part of the book was its effort to put a more formal and modern diagnosis on Mary's "madness." The author did a tremendous job of collecting contemporaneous accounts of her behavior and symptoms, and then in an appendix he asks a psychiatrist to render his opinion. The verdict? Bipolar Disorder with delusions and hallucinations, and personality traits that reflected paranoid, histrionic, narcissistic, and borderline tendencies--with a tinge of Post-Traumatic Stess Disorder (PTSD) as well. While it is always tricky to "retrofit" modern criteria to a person long dead who was not examined with those standards at the time, there is abundant evidence here to support his case. All in all, this was a psychological and historical narrative that was well worth the read.
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