Loving Frank Overview
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 groundbreaking historical 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 Mamah’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, and her unforgettable journey, marked by choices that reshape her notions of love and responsibility, leads inexorably to this novel’s stunning conclusion.
Loving Frank Specifications
Amazon Significant Seven, August 2007: It's a rare treasure to find a historically imagined novel that is at once fully versed in the facts and unafraid of weaving those truths into a story that dares to explore the unanswered questions. Frank Lloyd Wright and Mamah Cheney's love story is--as many early reviews of
Loving Frank have noted--little-known and often dismissed as scandal. In Nancy Horan's skillful hands, however, what you get is two fully realized people, entirely, irrepressibly, in love. Together, Frank and Mamah are a wholly modern portrait, and while you can easily imagine them in the here and now, it's their presence in the world of early 20th century America that shades how authentic and, ultimately, tragic their story is. Mamah's bright, earnest spirit is particularly tender in the context of her time and place, which afforded her little opportunity to realize the intellectual life for which she yearned.
Loving Frank is a remarkable literary achievement, tenderly acute and even-handed in even the most heartbreaking moments, and an auspicious debut from a writer to watch.
--Anne Bartholomew
Customer Reviews
Nancy Horan impressive first novel, Loving Frank created life Mamah Borthwick Cheney and his amazing love story with the famous architect Frank Lloyd Wright. The two met while living in Oak Park, Illinois, and both were married and had children. After hearing about a house for her and her husband began an affair with Mamah Frank, blew with the couple that ends in Germany to escape the prying eyes of the press and making the families they left behind decimated.
Oncein Europe, France relies on several design projects at work, and Mamah, a small feminist in her time, begins to translate the works of the European People's feminist Ellen Key. Mamah think that is key to talk to her, especially when important debates about marriage, family and the struggle to feel like a person over. Mamah feels to leave their children at the same time terribly clear that he was dying a slow death, but not less painful in an unhappy marriage. Desperatelywant to work and believes that this is much more than it excludes maternity --- --- even if they never stopped thinking about it and their children if they ever understand their destiny.
What time ago in Oak Park, Mamah writes in his diary: "I was on the side of life, watching it float. I want to swim in the river. I feel the current. Throw caution to the wind and plunges into life with Frank, whose share is the ebb and flow.One learns that her beloved can boastful, pungent, and not very open about money, but neither is it to forge a life committed to him. Shortly after arriving in Germany, pursuing the American press down, and the couple must flee to another city.
If the couple returned from Europe, seeking to Wisconsin to give them the area needed to build broad latest creation of Frank Taliesin, a home like no other. Once there, both Frank and Mamah take more measures to turnRelationships with their children may be more difficult than anticipated. You can not do for their year abroad, but seeks the middle road with his son and daughter to find. When she tries to overlook their relationship with architects and their rebellious children, Mamah and her family must be reconciled, beaten by a violent and incomprehensible tragedy.
More than a revisitation of his unhappy love affair, loving FRANK Mamah immersed in the lives and personalities ofcompletely cement-out character. Wife is not a patient or a miserable subject of ridicule. Rather, try to understand what centuries of women before you and since sought to determine: How can private self with the role of wife and mother. Their struggles are still relatable to this day, which is exactly what recent book by Leslie Bennetts, the feminine mistake: are we giving too much? Addresses.
Frank is an amazing talent and a bit 'smugCharacter, with others to do things. He believes that "the laws and rules are made for average people" and clearly stated to be a genius "... that make people's certificates." Mamah is both in awe of his talent and surprising in its confidence that both comfort and inspiration for his arrogance.
LOVING FRANK is told in third person, usually from the perspective of Mamah. With the choice of thoughts and feelings of focus, is able to illuminate some HoranTime and place, not only an unmarried couple, but also a woman of that time. Mamah tried her life as wife and mother, and also as an individual equilibrium. Through his relationship with Frank, he thinks, has finally found an easy way --- but at what price? As their perfect life, shaken violently, one wonders if this is the price to live freely, or were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Horan'smeticulous descriptions reveal that this relationship was not a mere sexual dalliance, but rather a bond cultivated over years of friendship and mutual respect. It was the fact that Frank appealed to Mamah's intellect rather than her passion that she found so intoxicating. We see their relationship being built over time and then becoming an inevitable force all its own. Yes, they both made a conscious choice to leave their families behind, but Horan is careful to demonstrate that this was done with much thought (and debt) on Mamah is a part.
We can not agree with their actions, but we can certainly see Mamah situation and sympathize with the characters rather than judge too harshly. Many years in the relationship, she realized that Mamah and Frank's first wife, Catherine, shared a painful reality: "The price we had to love both Frank has been paid so dear."
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