A Brave and Lovely Woman: Mamah Borthwick and Frank Lloyd Wright by Mark Borthwick (review)

Reviewed by: A Brave and Lovely Woman: Mamah Borthwick and Frank Lloyd Wright by Mark Borthwick Geoffrey Lokke Mark Borthwick, A Brave and Lovely Woman: Mamah Borthwick and Frank Lloyd Wright. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2023. 336 pp. $34.95 (hardcover). Martha Bouton "Mamah" Borthwick is remembered today as the ill-fated mistress of Frank Lloyd Wright. The two moved in the same circles in Oak Park, Illinois, the Chicago suburb in which Wright kept his home and first studio. Wright designed several buildings in the area, including a beautiful home for Edwin and Mamah Cheney. Ultimately, Mamah "lived with a man she didn't love in a house designed by one she did." (100) Once exposed, the affair spiraled into a phenomenal scandal, driving the couple from Oak Park by 1909. Wright and Borthwick (having reverted to her maiden name) settled at Taliesin in Spring Green, Wisconsin, the "prairie-style" estate Wright built for the two of them. Scandal turned to tragedy on August 15, 1914, when Borthwick and two of her sons with Cheney were murdered by Julian Carlton, an African American servant who apparently had suffered belligerent racist abuse from one of Wright's draftsmen. Carlton then set fire to Taliesin and killed most of those he caught fleeing the building. Borthwick thus remains chiefly known as a victim or a mistress. In contrast, her grisly murder is little more than a postscript in this biography written by Mark Borthwick, a distant relative. Although the author documents the gossip that plagued Borthwick, the book is foremost an attempt at an intellectual study of a woman who was a published translator and confidante of the Swedish ethicist and feminist Ellen Key. Borthwick was also a committed actor and aspiring playwright, and much of this book provides a social history of dramatic culture in the Midwest during Borthwick's lifetime, particularly the early reception and profound influence of the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen and the "New Woman" exemplified by the protagonist of his 1879 play A Doll's House. Early chapters follow the Borthwick family's move from Boone, Iowa to the Chicago area in 1874, just three years after the city's Great Fire. Her father, Marcus Smith Borthwick, was a foreman for the Chicago and North Western Railway and the inventor of a supposedly ingenious railway car brake that was promptly made obsolete by a rival design. In quick succession, Mamah received both her bachelor's and master's degrees at the University of Michigan, where she studied under literary critic Edward L. Walter and John Dewey, the famed educational reformer. She was ultimately [End Page 246] chosen as the valedictory "Seer" of her graduating class and delivered an oracular free-verse poem at commencement. According to her biographer, Borthwick "settled" for Cheney, whom she had met in Ann Arbor. With Wright, however, Borthwick found someone closer to an intellectual and spiritual match. The book details their shared interests in theatre and poetry, the work of Robert Browning in particular. Borthwick, it seems, introduced Wright to Ellen Key's acquaintance and suffragist writings. Her biographer, however, notes that any direct influence of Borthwick on Wright's artistic practice is very difficult to discern, despite Wright intimating that the relationship between the buildings and landscape at Taliesin resembled his and Borthwick's own. Borthwick, however, seemed to have been directly inspired by her relationship with Wright; her play, Woman of the Hour (1908), "testified to her unhappy marriage." (9) Her biographer contends that the central characters were barely veiled stand-ins for Borthwick, Wright, and Cheney. Borthwick's play premiered at Oak Park's Nineteenth Century Club, where she also lectured on Shakespeare and Goethe. Another chapter is focused on Borthwick's performance as the lead role in a musical inspired by a Dickens novel. Borthwick, that is, the author of this book, at times seems frustrated with the scarcity of evidence at his disposal. Some chapters are punctuated with invented dialogue: what might have Wright or Borthwick said under the circumstances? Ibsen is put to similar work; close readings of A Doll's House are punctuated with speculation as to whether Borthwick would have said, done...