The Emancipator's Wife by Barbara Hambly

In private, she will struggle with depression and addiction as she endures the betrayals–both real and imagined–of family and friends. In public, she will fight to preserve Lincoln’s memory even as she battles a bitterly contested insanity trial. Yet it is in the years to come that Mary Todd Lincoln will truly come into her own. But by the time the fiery storm of war passes, tragedy will have claimed two sons, scandal will shadow her days as First Lady, and an assassin’s bullet will take Lincoln himself, leaving Mary alone and all but forgotten by the nation that owed her husband its survival.

As Lincoln’s star rises, the pleasure-loving Mary learns, often the hard way, the rules of being a politician’s wife. Their first child will be born under the gathering clouds of a civil war, and three more follow.

After a stormy courtship and a broken engagement, Abraham Lincoln will marry twenty-four-year-old Mary Todd and give her a ring inscribed with the words “Love Is Eternal.”īut their happiness won’t last nearly so long. Although she is courted by the most eligible suitors in the land, including future senator Stephen Douglas, it is a gangly lawyer from Illinois who captures her heart. But no one knows her secret fears and anxieties. Vivacious, impulsive, and intoxicated by politics, she is a Todd of Lexington, an aristocratic family whose ancestors defeated the British. As a girl growing up in Kentucky, she lived a sheltered, privileged life filled with picnics and plantation balls.

The Emancipator's Wife by Barbara Hambly