1875. Elizabeth Todd Edwards reels from news that her younger sister Mary, former First Lady and widow of President Abraham Lincoln, has attempted suicide. The shocking act followed legal proceedings arranged by Mary's eldest and only surviving son that declared her legally insane. The Todd sisters - maternal Elizabeth, peacemaker Frances, envious Ann, and much adored Emilie - had always turned to one another in times of joy and heartache. But when...

"A miracle; an exquisite story exquisitely told . . . If you love Jane Austen, or Hamilton , or fiction--of any era--that transports and transforms in equal measure, look no further." --A.J. Finn, bestselling author of The Woman in the Window From the prizewinning author of Mr. Timothy and The Pale Blue Eye comes Courting Mr. Lincoln , the page-turning and surprising story of a young Abraham Lincoln and the two people who loved him best: a young,...

"The New York Times bestselling author of Mrs. Lincoln's Dressmaker, Jennifer Chiaverini, reveals the famous First Lady's very public social and political contest with Kate Chase Sprague, memorialized as "one of the most remarkable women ever known to Washington society." (Providence Journal) Kate Chase Sprague was born in 1840 in Cincinnati, Ohio, the second daughter to the second wife of a devout but ambitious lawyer. Her father, Salmon P. Chase,...

More fascinating than fiction, this is the moving story of the most misunderstood woman in American history…The truth about Mary Lincoln has for nearly a century been hidden under a mountain of myth.They said Lincoln really loved Ann Rutledge. That he had tried to avoid marriage to Mary Todd, that his wife hurt him politically though she drove him to the Presidency, that she embarrassed him financially as well as socially and inflicted on him the...

Explores the tumultuous marriage between Abraham Lincoln and Mary Todd, including an examination of her illicit business dealings, alleged physical abuse, and their disagreements about values.

Historian Catherine Clinton draws on important new research to illuminate the remarkable life of Mary Lincoln. Her story is inextricably tied with her husband's presidency, yet her life is an extraordinary chronicle on its own. From an aristocratic Kentucky family, she was an educated, well-connected Southern daughter, and when she married a Springfield lawyer she became a Northern wife--an experience mirrored by thousands of her countrywomen. The...

Relates the lives of Mary Todd Lincoln, raised in a wealthy Virginia family, and Lizzy Keckley, a dressmaker born a slave, as they grow up separately then become best friends when Mary's childhood dream of living in the White House comes true.

"The story of Abraham Lincoln as it has never been told before: through the strange, even otherworldly, points of contact between his family and that of the man who killed him, John Wilkes Booth. In the 1820s, two families, unknown to each other, worked on farms in the American wilderness. It seemed unlikely that the families would ever meet-and yet, they did. The son of one family, the famed actor John Wilkes Booth, killed the son of the other, President...