By Coral Gables Gazette staff
History has been cruel to Mary Todd Lincoln. The received portrait — demanding, erratic, financially reckless, a burden to the president and an embarrassment to the nation — was largely assembled by the men who surrounded her in widowhood and written into the record before she had any means to contest it. That portrait has proved remarkably durable. It has also, according to a significant new biography arriving at Books & Books this week, been significantly wrong.
Books & Books presents an evening with Lois Romano on Friday, June 5, at 7 p.m. at its Coral Gables location. Romano will discuss her debut book, An Inconvenient Widow: The Torment, Trial, and Triumph of Mary Todd Lincoln, in conversation with Pulitzer Prize–winning humorist and Miami Herald columnist Dave Barry. The event is free and open to the public; books will be available for purchase. Seating is not guaranteed and early arrival is recommended.
The book arrives at a moment when the historical record on women adjacent to presidential power is being systematically reexamined — and few reputations have been more distorted by that proximity than Mary Todd Lincoln’s. That a national political journalist is making Coral Gables an early stop on her tour for a major historical biography reflects the city’s standing as a serious literary destination and Books & Books’ reputation as one of South Florida’s most consequential stages for that conversation.
The book and its argument
Romano argues that the traditional portrait of Mary Todd Lincoln rests on a record shaped disproportionately by hostile contemporaries — influential men who wrote her story for her, often unfairly, and whose accounts calcified into accepted history. The Mary Todd Lincoln of this biography is someone who lobbied actively for her husband’s political career, understood Washington’s power dynamics with unusual sophistication for a woman of her era, steadfastly supported the Union war effort, visited encampments, tended to wounded soldiers, and donated generously to refugees from slavery.
She was also, Romano does not deny, genuinely difficult. She was demanding, with unpredictable mood swings and a vindictive nature that could nurture grudges for decades. Her impulse spending created financial difficulty and opened her to scandal. She made enemies. But Romano’s central argument — drawing on hundreds of archives, letters, and memoirs — is that the disproportion between her actual flaws and her historical reputation reveals as much about the era’s treatment of ambitious women as it does about the woman herself. After Lincoln was assassinated, she was all but abandoned by the nation he had given his life to defend and preserve.
The book has arrived on the New York Times bestseller list. Doris Kearns Goodwin, whose Team of Rivals remains the defining account of Lincoln’s political genius, called it a deeply human portrayal of a woman who was not merely a witness to history but a full partner in a presidency that altered its course. Lincoln scholar Harold Holzer, winner of the Lincoln Prize and author of more than fifty books on Lincoln, said it takes its place among the best biographies ever produced about a presidential wife.
The author and her moderator
Romano is a long-time national political journalist who served as an editor, writer, and columnist for The Washington Post and Politico, covering seven presidential races during her career at the Post. She began in the paper’s Style section writing in-depth profiles of major political figures before moving to national coverage. An Inconvenient Widow is her debut book.
Her conversation partner is among South Florida’s most recognizable literary figures. Dave Barry wrote a nationally syndicated humor column for the Miami Herald from 1983 to 2005, syndicated to more than 500 newspapers, and won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1988 — one of the rare humorists to receive journalism’s highest honor. He is the author of dozens of bestselling books and remains one of Miami’s most beloved public intellectuals. The pairing of a serious political biographer with South Florida’s most celebrated comic writer promises an evening as likely to generate laughter as illumination — which is, in its own way, an appropriate register for a book about a woman history refused to take seriously.
