Frank Lloyd Wright is remembered as one of America’s great architects and one of the republic’s true eccentrics. In the 1910s he was also the notorious subject of scandal sheets for his much-publicized affair with his mistress, a married woman, Mamah Borthwick. Press accounts of their relationship became lurid with her 1914 murder at the hands of their servant, who set fire to Taliesin, killing six victims altogether.
Mark Borthwick expends only a few pages on the murder, and only several chapters on Wright. Distantly related to his subject from a far branch of the family tree, the author is more concerned with understanding her life as an unusually independent woman at the turn of the last century. Mamah’s family supported her desire for higher education. Gifted with languages, she earned a master’s degree at Ann Arbor and enjoyed a career translating essays by European feminists. The Borthwick family didn’t shunt her into marriage. She was nearly 30 before succumbing to social pressure and marrying a college friend, an electrical engineer. He responded to his wife’s public breach of their vows with a stoic lack of bitterness.
Much will never be known for certain, as the author readily admits, yet A Brave and Lovely Woman casts light on the status of women in the early 20th century and on a period of Wright’s life that the architect understandably preferred to forget.
