What price for love?

This portrait of a woman seems innocuous enough but believe me when I say that she was once at the center of a huge scandal. Her name is Mamah (pronounced May-muh) Borthwick Cheney and she was a very much married woman and mother when she fell in love with the architect Frank Lloyd Wright after he was commissioned to build their family house. Needless to say this scandal wrecked Mamah's life and very nearly destroyed Wright's career.

Loving Frank by Nancy Horan is a fictional retelling of their story. The book details the trajectory of their relationship until its ultimately tragic ending.

Such a subject matter could have easily turned mawkish and overly sentimental if not for Horan’s careful portrait of Mamah. She doesn’t overly deal with sentimentality or emotion. Instead she paints a portrait of a woman who is constrained by the roles imposed on her by society. During the early years of the 20^th century, women were supposed to be wives and mothers but not much else. It was a time of great agitation for greater female emancipation and in society by such stalwarts as Charlotte Perkins Gillman, Emma Goldman and the Swedish feminist Ellen Key. Mamah with her husband and children was an aberration of those times because she wasn’t content with her lot. Though as her sister Liz, later acidly points out, “she had the kind of life most feminists would dream of having.” And the price Mamah pays indeed for daring to break free of the mold and insist on a kind of self-realization was a high one. At the end of the book, Horan leaves it up to us to decide whether her act was worth the price it cost her.