The Emancipator's Wife, Barbara Hambly
Apr. 6th, 2005 09:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ellarienThis arrived last Tuesday, and I started it on the Thursday and finished it on Monday night. It isn't a short book, either.
Historical fiction about real historical figures isn't one of my usual subgenres of choice; I got this strictly because I like the author's style. I wasn't disappointed. Hambly does better than anyone else I can think of at evoking the look and smell and texture of another age; she does amazing things with light -- magelight, firelight, candlelight, gaslight -- and shadows. She also does a good job, in this novel, of conveying the utter stifling frustration of being a smart, ambitious woman in a time and place when well-brought up women weren't supposed to have brains, not to mention someone who could have really used modern psychiatric medicine in a time when all that was available was alchohol and laudanum sold as 'patent medicine'.
If you object to whiny protagonists, mind, this probably isn't for you. Mrs. Lincoln doesn't just whine; she screams and weeps and self-medicates and takes to her bed for weeks on end. She has plenty to feel sorry for herself about, what with chronic health problems and losing three of her four sons as well as her husband, but she doesn't do herself many favours.
The structure of the novel is complex, with most of Mary Todd Lincoln's life seen in flashback, more or less but not completely in order, framed by the story of her 1875 stint in a genteel mental institution. It worked for me, but it isn't ever going to be a comfort read.
Historical fiction about real historical figures isn't one of my usual subgenres of choice; I got this strictly because I like the author's style. I wasn't disappointed. Hambly does better than anyone else I can think of at evoking the look and smell and texture of another age; she does amazing things with light -- magelight, firelight, candlelight, gaslight -- and shadows. She also does a good job, in this novel, of conveying the utter stifling frustration of being a smart, ambitious woman in a time and place when well-brought up women weren't supposed to have brains, not to mention someone who could have really used modern psychiatric medicine in a time when all that was available was alchohol and laudanum sold as 'patent medicine'.
If you object to whiny protagonists, mind, this probably isn't for you. Mrs. Lincoln doesn't just whine; she screams and weeps and self-medicates and takes to her bed for weeks on end. She has plenty to feel sorry for herself about, what with chronic health problems and losing three of her four sons as well as her husband, but she doesn't do herself many favours.
The structure of the novel is complex, with most of Mary Todd Lincoln's life seen in flashback, more or less but not completely in order, framed by the story of her 1875 stint in a genteel mental institution. It worked for me, but it isn't ever going to be a comfort read.
