Lois Romano — An Inconvenient Widow: Mary Todd Lincoln
Journalist Lois Romano rescues Mary Todd Lincoln from caricature in a biography that chronicles her torment, her grief, and her survival after the assassination.
Why we picked this
Mary Todd Lincoln has been flattened by history into either a grieving prop or a liability. Romano's biography actually looks at who she was—and what the decades after Ford's Theatre cost her.
Mary Todd Lincoln lived for seventeen years after her husband was shot beside her at Ford’s Theatre, and those years are among the most poorly understood of any figure in American political life. She was committed to a mental asylum by her son Robert, fought her way out, and spent the rest of her life navigating a country that had no idea what to do with her. Lois Romano’s An Inconvenient Widow is a serious attempt to understand who she actually was.
Romano, a veteran Washington journalist who covered politics for The Washington Post for decades, brings both archival rigor and narrative craft to the subject. The book is praised for treating Lincoln with the complexity she deserves—neither the myth nor the caricature, but a person shaped by grief, politics, and the impossible conditions of her life.
Romano joins Politics and Prose in conversation with Washington Post reporter and editor Elisabeth Bumiller. Free and open to the public, Connecticut Avenue flagship.