Going by Sufjan Stevens's folk reprise, Mary Todd Lincoln - the wife of America's 16th president - “went insane for very good reasons”. Well, the assassination of her beloved at Ford's Theatre in 1865 might be the place to start in a life marked by many tragedies and scandals - enough, in fact, to make for a historical page-turner. The heady doses of opium, laudanum and chloral hydrate could not have helped, either.

Question is, was Mrs Lincoln simply unorthodox or truly deranged? She herself says, while reading a trumped-up account of her attempted suicide, “paper cannot be made to hold one authentic fact of my history”. And so the 57-year-old widow builds her own sanity defence from an asylum after being committed by an Illinois court at the behest of her son Robert (the eldest and sole surviving of four boys). While disclosing all and sundry of her past life, she arouses by turns our admiration and sympathy.

In the beginning, they come from Kentucky but different worlds: Mary, a sophisticated family, the fourth of 16 children of a politician, extensively educated by a Frenchwoman; Abraham, from a poor farming family with little formal schooling. When the two collide at a ball in Springfield, Illinois, Miss Todd is irresistibly drawn to the ugly, awkward, junior partner in her cousin's law firm. Besides, their union was fated by Queen Ruby (in whose palm-reading she places much stock). It turns out that they share an interest in Whig politics and William's poetry (she Shakespeare, on love; he Knox, on death). After a rocky courtship - her family disapproves, she impels him to deflower her, he suffers terrible melancholy - Mary wilfully exchanges her easy life for one of hardship.

We follow Mary through a tale of unremitting loneliness and grief: through her early years, marked by her mother's death in childbirth; her husband's slow rise to power; the raising of her sons and their early deaths (Eddie, at 4, from consumption; Willie, at 11, from typhoid; Tad, at 18, from pleurisy); two presidential terms, which include the bloody Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation (freeing all slaves within the Confederacy and introducing measures that result in abolition); the betrayal by her closest friend, a coloured dressmaker; and foremost, every spending excursion à la china, curtains and cushions.

Janis Cooke Newman's fictional debut is a tender and thoughtful portrait of a 19th- century woman severely misunderstood. Mrs Lincoln lived passionately, indeed - from sex to seance, socialising to shopping. Her petulance so exacerbates her stepmother that she calls Mary “the limb of Satan”. Later, her imprudence brings fierce criticism from society- some accuse her of Confederate sympathies or betraying her Southern roots; others find her simply devoid of self-control when her extravagance runs her family into detrimental debt. Her ambition and persistence influences her husband's career and major governmental decisions - a definite no-no in the 1800s.

Mrs Lincoln unfolds with plenty to inspire, and is all the more poignant for a timely arrival, as a former president's wife and an African-American compete for the Democratic nomination.

Her role as First Lady was certainly “as legitimate as Secretary of State, or of War”, but had she lived now, Mrs Lincoln would have made a formidable rival to John McCain.

Mrs Lincoln by Janis Cooke Newman
Myrmidon Books £16.99

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