Author Mark Borthwick, left, and his book about cousin Mamah Borthwick, 'A Brave and Lovely Woman"
Mark Borthwick’s family members never mentioned their complicated genealogical connection to Mamah Borthwick — Mark’s second cousin thrice removed who also happened to be architect Frank Lloyd Wright’s lover. Instead, he read about Mamah in Many Masks: A Life of Frank Lloyd Wright, published in 1987 and written by Wright’s friend, the late longtime New Yorker scribe Brendan Gill.
“I was just astonished [to find out] she and I have a family connection that goes back to a common ancestor in New York in around 1770,” says Borthwick, 76, former director of the U.S. Asia Pacific Council at the East-West Center. After digging deeper, he deemed Mamah’s life — which ended in her 1914 murder at Wright’s famed Taliesin estate near Spring Green — worthy of its own story. The result is A Brave and Lovely Woman: Mamah Borthwick and Frank Lloyd Wright, published by University of Wisconsin Press this month.
The book’s title is taken from Wright’s own words about Mamah (pronounced “MAY-muh,” a nickname for “Mary”) in an 1,100-word letter he wrote to the Spring Green community via a local newspaper after her death.
Deeply researched, A Brave and Lovely Woman portrays her as confident, charismatic and intelligent. Mamah, Iowa-born and Illinois-raised, was a member of a conservative sorority at the University of Michigan (where she earned a master’s degree and met her future husband, electrical engineer Edwin Cheney), as well as a dedicated mother and, eventually, a pioneer in the American feminist movement. Her latter evolution took root once she started translating the works of Swedish suffragist and feminist thinker Ellen Key around 1910.
“We need to appreciate how the so-called modern world was impacting such women as Mamah, who were so smart and ahead of their time,” Borthwick says. “She is an archetype for that type of woman in the early 20th century, and I think she really was brave. She’s an example of the courage that it takes to change in adulthood. She wasn’t a rebel to begin with, but she was about 40 years old when she suddenly began to move away from old traditions.”
What’s more, Mamah is proof that women who are partners of famous men aren’t simply props or mere inspiration. “They can be very successful in their own right,” says Borthwick, who lives in Washington, D.C., and Vermont.
Mamah and Wright met in Oak Park, Ill., at the turn of the century, and though the couple, who were both married to others at the time, tried to keep their affair a secret, it soon made headlines in Chicago newspapers, even as they fled to Europe to escape the love and marriage norms of early 20th-century American society.
Upon returning to the States, Mamah eventually settled at Taliesin, where she was murdered in August 1914 during a bizarre incident involving a hatchet-wielding butler who set the estate ablaze. Her two children, a boy and a girl, also died in the tragedy.
Because of the role she played in Wright’s history, Mamah has been overlooked in the architect’s narrative, Borthwick claims. “He had so many admirers who believed he made a terrible mistake when he left for Europe with Mamah, because he was a rising star,” the author says. “But he dropped everything and took off, and I think people resented and blamed Mamah as being just a seductress. There was a feeling that she ruined what might have happened with his genius, and they put her aside as a footnote that he managed to overcome.”
But overcoming the loss of Mamah wasn’t easy. Bothwick speculates that she “tainted” Wright, in the eyes of the public in that era, adding that her death created “an unsavory end” to the couple’s story: “She was just dismissed, and he had to bury her and downplay her very existence.” (Mamah was buried in an unmarked grave near Taliesin that has since been updated with a tombstone that bears her full name.)
UW Press and Taliesin Preservation are partnering to present a virtual launch of A Brave and Lovely Woman on March 14 from 6:30 to 7:30 p.m. The event will include a remote presentation by Borthwick, followed by a question-and-answer session. Copies of the book can be preordered with signed bookplates through Taliesin. Information on that and registering for the virtual launch is at taliesinpreservation.org.
