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Fiction.
Literature.
Historical Fiction.
HTML:I have been standing on the side of life, watching it float by. I want to swim in the river. I want to feel the current.
So writes Mamah Borthwick Cheney in her diary as she struggles to justify her clandestine love affair with Frank Lloyd Wright. Four years earlier, in 1903, Mamah and her husband, Edwin, had commissioned the renowned architect to design a new home for them. During the construction of the house, a powerful attraction developed between Mamah and Frank, and in time the lovers, each married with children, embarked on a course that would shock Chicago society and forever change their lives.
In this ambitious debut novel, fact and fiction blend together brilliantly. While scholars have largely relegated Mamah to a footnote in the life of America??s greatest architect, author Nancy Horan gives full weight to their dramatic love story and illuminates Cheney??s profound influence on Wright.
Drawing on years of research, Horan weaves little-known facts into a compelling narrative, vividly portraying the conflicts and struggles of a woman forced to choose between the roles of mother, wife, lover, and intellectual. Horan??s Mamah is a woman seeking to find her own place, her own creative calling in the world. Mamah??s is an unforgettable journey marked by choices that reshape her notions of love and responsibility, leading inexorably ultimately lead to this novel??s stunning conclusion.
Elegantly written and remarkably rich in detail, Loving Frank is a fitting tribute to a courageous woman, a national icon, and their timeless love story.
BONUS: This edition includes an excerpt from Nancy Horan's Under the Wide and Starry Sky.
Advance praise for Loving Frank:
??Loving Frank is one of those novels that takes over your life. It??s mesmerizing and fascinating??filled with complex characters, deep passions, tactile descriptions of astonishing architecture, and the colorful immediacy of daily life a hundred years ago??all gathered into a story that unfolds with riveting urgency.? ??Lauren Belfer, author of City of Light
??This graceful, assured first novel tells the remarkable story of the long-lived affair between Frank Lloyd Wright, a passionate and impossible figure, and Mamah Cheney, a married woman whom Wright beguiled and led beyond the restraint of convention. It is engrossing, provocative reading.? ????Scott Turow
??It takes great courage to write a novel about historical people, and in particular to give voice to someone as mythic as Frank Lloyd Wright. This beautifully written novel about Mamah Cheney and Frank Lloyd Wright??s love affair is vivid and intelligent, unsentimental and compassionate.? ????Jane Hamilton
??I admire this novel, adore this novel, for so many reasons: The intelligence and lyricism of the prose. The attention to period detail. The epic proportions of this most fascinating love story. Mamah Cheney has been in my head and heart and soul since reading this… (mais)
“Ellen was arguing that women’s energy should be used for child rearing, that suffragists were wrongheaded to focus so intently on jobs and equal pay when motherhood was their legitimate work. For a woman to rush out seeking men’s work was to abandon her post by the cradle as the shaper of the human race. Far better, Ellen argued, that the emancipators worked toward rewarding and enhancing the job of ‘mother.’” This quote from the text describes the thinking of Ellen Key, a Swedish feminist writer in the early 1900s. Mamah Borthwick, protagonist of Loving Frank, translated some of Key’s work into English and considered Ellen a mentor. Mamah was a real person in this fictionalized history, and the book follows her passionate love affair with Frank Lloyd Wright starting in 1909.
Though Ellen was a mentor, Mamah disagreed that motherhood should be her life’s vocation. In fact, she left her young children and her husband to pursue her dreams of being a writer and translator. Of course, she also sought to travel with Wright and experience his architectural world. She continues to value her lifestyle, even though the press scandalized her living as an unmarried partner to Frank. She values a new morality that allows women to be strong, career-oriented, independent, and cultured. After a considerable time, Mamah regrets leaving her children and negotiates an agreement with her ex-husband to see them for a few weeks each summer.
The story follows Mamah and Frank as they travel from Chicago to Europe and back to Wisconsin, where they live together in the famous Taliesen. Mameh valued freedom over the traditional female roles of her time. She expresses her philosophy with confidence. Frank Lloyd Wright valued her strength and intellect as a woman. Unsurprisingly, people are still writing about her one hundred years after her death. ( )
I was interested to read this as I'm heading to Chicago soon and viewing a number of FLW buildings. This book fictionalised the relationship between FLW and Mamah Borthwick. While the book was interesting it didn't paint FLW in the best light. A flawed genius I would say. I did find the book interesting but wouldn't rate it as a brilliant book. ( )
Thoroughly enjoyable read that highlights the life of one woman in the early 20th century who was torn between being a wife and mother or spending her life with the brilliant, volatile man she fell in love with, Frank Lloyd Wright, and pursuing her own intellectual interests. This book is extremely well written and propels you into the moral dilemmas faced by Wright's mistress. ( )
I appreciated learning about the lives of both Frank Lloyd Wright and Mamah Borthwick, his partner until her murder at age 45. The times, attitudes, and prejudices were presented well. I would have liked more background on the villain, as I believe there are many of the same issues today as there were in the U.S. in 1914. The feminist ideas were also an interesting history of the movement both here and abroad. ( )
Informação do Conhecimento Comum em inglês.Edite para a localizar na sua língua.
One lives but once in the world. ~Johann Wolfgang von Goeth
Dedicatória
Informação do Conhecimento Comum em inglês.Edite para a localizar na sua língua.
For Kevin
Primeiras palavras
Informação do Conhecimento Comum em inglês.Edite para a localizar na sua língua.
It was Edwin who wanted to build a new house.
Citações
Informação do Conhecimento Comum em inglês.Edite para a localizar na sua língua.
Mamah describes Wright as someone who, "had come to mistake his gift for the whole of his character."
"The measure of a man's culture is the measure of his appreciation," he said.
"I'm like the truck of a cactus, I suppose," she told him. "I take in a dose of culture and time with friends, then I retreat and go live on it for a while until I get thirsty again. It's not good to live so much inside oneself. It's a self-imposed exile, really. It make you different."
Tell me everything. He might as well have said, "Take off your dress."
"Oh, I was just the right age then, I think. Smarter than I ever was before or since."
"My father would put me on his shoulders so I could get the big view, and he'd talk about the wildflowers and grasses and clouds. He had a name for the bottom of the sky—'the hem of heaven.'"
"Too many of us make small lives for ourselves."
"Don't you see?" Mamah plunged in. "How can I know if this is what I should do if I don't go? If I don't have time to live over there with him, even briefly? You have a happy marriage. I don't. You played your cards right the first time. I didn't. Does that mean I have to play this hand to the bitter end, full of regret? Knowing I might have had the happiest life imaginable with the one man I love more than any other I have ever known?"
"I'm quite sure it hasn't been translated into English." She glanced into his eyes. "Don't laugh, but I feel as if I were meant to find it." ¶ "Perhaps you were." ¶ "Let's translate it together," she said. "We could actually bring this into English for the first time." ¶ Frank looked skeptical. "But my entire vocabulary is 'nein' and 'ja'." ¶ "That's not true. You know 'guten morgen'!" ¶ "Ja."
When Jessie died, it felt as if her soul just whooshed away. And what was left behind was some empty useless thing, no more sacred a vessel than an old suitcase. ¶ What had stunned Mamah about Jessie's death was how quickly, how utterly, the flesh made that transition from life force to breathless rag. What it had carried inside of it before, that brew of tenderness, wit, fierce loyalty, intelligence—the essence of Jessie—had simply vaporized.
"I remember just after Jessie's death," Mamah said. "I was at a church picnic, and there was a potato-sack race going on. I looked around at all these people hopping crazily along, each with one leg in a potato sack. They were laughing, but they were also quite serious about winning that race. And I remember thinking, 'Don't these people know they're going to die?'"
"Great love, like great genius, can never be a duty: both are life's gracious gifts to the elect."
"She says that once love leaves a marriage, then the marriage isn't sacred anymore. But if a true, great love happens outside of marriage, it's sacred and has its own rights."
"Love is moral even without legal marriage."
"But marriage is immoral without love."
She felt a clarity, even more than before, as if she were viewing everything, even herself, from a distance. 'How small we humans are,' she thought. 'All our scrambling around, trying to buttress ourselves against death. All our efforts to insulate ourselves against uncertainty with codes of behavior and meaningless busyness.' ¶ How ridiculous it all seemed, when life itself was so short, so precious. To live dishonestly seemed a cowardly way to use up one's time. For all the troubles life had meted out to her, she thought, it had given her more extraordinary gifts.
What he kept from her, though, was what she kept from him—the terrible weight of remorse and doubt that daily, hourly sometimes, shifted inside like cargo.
To have a love so great for her child that she would give her up—she was stunned by it.
It was comforting to help people fling their hopes out into the ether on the long chance that something good would come back.
"What will you do if Frank returns to his wife? You'll have nothing." But Mamah felt now that if that came to be, she had more than nothing. She had whatever it was inside herself that made her survive.
"One day I woke up and thought, 'What have you done with your gifts? You've traded them for furniture.'"
Mamah stiffened as if she'd just discovered someone snooping around in her drawers.
"We have all our little battles going on inside."
Two years in a child's life is the distance between stars, she thought.
In the foreground, growing in ditches, sumac trees raised their deltoid fingertips, while in the far distance, hills receded in deepening grays.
For reporters who were supposed to be fiercely competitive, the men were behaving like old chums. They seemed to have formed a quick camaraderie, the way travelers do when they find themselves thrown together in a strange place.
Mamah knew Lucky for what he was a beggar who charmed scraps out of the toughest party.
Últimas palavras
Informação do Conhecimento Comum em inglês.Edite para a localizar na sua língua.
Frank rolls up the plan. Outside, he unfurls it and holds it open so Billy can see it. The carpenter studies it, then walks beside Frank as they pace out the perimeter.
Fiction.
Literature.
Historical Fiction.
HTML:I have been standing on the side of life, watching it float by. I want to swim in the river. I want to feel the current.
So writes Mamah Borthwick Cheney in her diary as she struggles to justify her clandestine love affair with Frank Lloyd Wright. Four years earlier, in 1903, Mamah and her husband, Edwin, had commissioned the renowned architect to design a new home for them. During the construction of the house, a powerful attraction developed between Mamah and Frank, and in time the lovers, each married with children, embarked on a course that would shock Chicago society and forever change their lives.
In this ambitious debut novel, fact and fiction blend together brilliantly. While scholars have largely relegated Mamah to a footnote in the life of America??s greatest architect, author Nancy Horan gives full weight to their dramatic love story and illuminates Cheney??s profound influence on Wright.
Drawing on years of research, Horan weaves little-known facts into a compelling narrative, vividly portraying the conflicts and struggles of a woman forced to choose between the roles of mother, wife, lover, and intellectual. Horan??s Mamah is a woman seeking to find her own place, her own creative calling in the world. Mamah??s is an unforgettable journey marked by choices that reshape her notions of love and responsibility, leading inexorably ultimately lead to this novel??s stunning conclusion.
Elegantly written and remarkably rich in detail, Loving Frank is a fitting tribute to a courageous woman, a national icon, and their timeless love story.
BONUS: This edition includes an excerpt from Nancy Horan's Under the Wide and Starry Sky.
Advance praise for Loving Frank:
??Loving Frank is one of those novels that takes over your life. It??s mesmerizing and fascinating??filled with complex characters, deep passions, tactile descriptions of astonishing architecture, and the colorful immediacy of daily life a hundred years ago??all gathered into a story that unfolds with riveting urgency.? ??Lauren Belfer, author of City of Light
??This graceful, assured first novel tells the remarkable story of the long-lived affair between Frank Lloyd Wright, a passionate and impossible figure, and Mamah Cheney, a married woman whom Wright beguiled and led beyond the restraint of convention. It is engrossing, provocative reading.? ????Scott Turow
??It takes great courage to write a novel about historical people, and in particular to give voice to someone as mythic as Frank Lloyd Wright. This beautifully written novel about Mamah Cheney and Frank Lloyd Wright??s love affair is vivid and intelligent, unsentimental and compassionate.? ????Jane Hamilton
??I admire this novel, adore this novel, for so many reasons: The intelligence and lyricism of the prose. The attention to period detail. The epic proportions of this most fascinating love story. Mamah Cheney has been in my head and heart and soul since reading this
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Though Ellen was a mentor, Mamah disagreed that motherhood should be her life’s vocation. In fact, she left her young children and her husband to pursue her dreams of being a writer and translator. Of course, she also sought to travel with Wright and experience his architectural world. She continues to value her lifestyle, even though the press scandalized her living as an unmarried partner to Frank. She values a new morality that allows women to be strong, career-oriented, independent, and cultured. After a considerable time, Mamah regrets leaving her children and negotiates an agreement with her ex-husband to see them for a few weeks each summer.
The story follows Mamah and Frank as they travel from Chicago to Europe and back to Wisconsin, where they live together in the famous Taliesen. Mameh valued freedom over the traditional female roles of her time. She expresses her philosophy with confidence. Frank Lloyd Wright valued her strength and intellect as a woman. Unsurprisingly, people are still writing about her one hundred years after her death. (