A novel about the affair between Frank Lloyd Wright and Mamah Borthwick Cheney. IN "Ragtime," his fable of social change in early-20th-century America, E. L. Doctorow sent a stuffy paterfamilias on an expedition to the North Pole, leaving his docile wife behind in New Rochelle. In the Arctic, the man was disgusted to encounter uninhibited Eskimo women coupling lustily with their husbands. Watching one of them in flagrante, he thought nostalgically of his seemly spouse and doubted whether the Eskimo wife even deserved the name of woman. But while he was off finding the True North, his wife was undertaking her own journey of J discovery, setting her sensuality aflame with the teachings of Emma Goldman. Upon the explorer's return, he sensed with alarm that the orbit of his "moral planet" had shifted. In their marital bed, his wife was "not as vigorously modest as she'd been." To him, her liberation felt like a punishment from God. But what did it feel like to her? Would changing mores permit her to leave a man she had outgrown and still keep her good name? Mamah Borthwick Cheney, around 1912. "Loving Frank," an enthralling first novel by Nancy Horan, is set at the same time as Doctorow's modern classic - the decade before World War I - and recreates its weld of fact and fiction, wrapped around the core theme of female self-actualization. Unlike the wife in "Ragtime," however, the woman under scrutiny in Horan's book actually lived, and the world's reaction to her liberation is known. The "Frank" of Horan's title is the architect Frank Lloyd Wright; the "Loving" came from a woman who has been all but erased from history's rolls: Mamah (pronounced MAY-muh) Borthwick Cheney, a learned, lovely woman who scan dalized Chicago when she left her husband and two young children to flee to Europe with Wright - who left behind a wife and six children of his own. The two fell in love in 1907, while Wright was building a "prairie house" for Mamah and Edwin Cheney in Oak Park. If guilt were calculated by the sheer number of abandoned offspring, Wright's rap sheet would have been longer than Mamah's; but Mamah was more vilified because she was a woman. (Horan weaves lurid contemporary press accounts into her narrative as proof.) In society's view, Wright was merely misbehaving, while Mrs. Cheney was doing something far more shocking: acting like an unnatural mother. Horan prods readers to consider an uncomfortable question: Were Mamah's feelings unnatural? Edwin Cheney didn't think so; he granted her a divorce and allowed her access to their children. Wright didn't think so; he wanted to marry her, but his estranged wife, Catherine, refused to divorce him. Compelling the reader's sympathy, Horan evokes the image of Mamah, sunk in depression after the birth of her second child, recording a quotation by Charlotte Perkins Gilman in her diary: "It is not sufficient to be a mother: an oyster can be a mother." Mamah wanted more. "For as long as Mamah could remember," Horan writes, "she had felt a longing inside for something she could not name." A few months after the diary entry, that longing acquired a name: Frank Lloyd Wright. Public outrage followed Frank and Mamah across the Atlantic in 1909, endangering the young architect's career and destroying his companion's good name. Wright's legacy has been retroactively protected and buttressed by his work, but Mamah Borthwick Cheney's reputation didn't survive their romance - and neither did she. Horan follows the couple as their relationship travels from its anxious, ecstatic beginnings, past doubts and compromises, through renewed hope, and on to its tragic close. The conversations she invents between Mamah and Frank, as between all of the characters, proceed with unforced ease, enfolding multiple layers of their personal and professional lives, touching on poetry, translation, architecture, idealism, love and family. At a distance of a hundred years, these conversations can hardly be actual, but Horan makes them plausible and engrossing. In France, desperately wishing to ease her guilt over leaving her family, Mamah seeks solace in the feminism of the Swedish suffragist Ellen Key. (Key later authorized Mamah to translate some of her work into English.) Reading Key's book "Love and Marriage," Mamah tells her lover in excitement: "She says that once love leaves a marriage, then the marriage isn't sacred anymore. But if a true, great love happens outside of marriage, it's sacred and has its own rights." Exhilarated, she continues: "The human race will evolve to a higher plane where there won't be a need for laws regulating marriage and divorce." Cynically but not unkindly, he responds, "So if we can just hang on for a millennium or two, it'll all work out." Upon the couple's return to America, Wright built a refuge for them in the hills of southwestern Wisconsin - his famous Taliesin - hoping to escape censure and prying eyes. But their bid for privacy failed, and reporters besieged them. Grieved by the sanctimoniousness of the "birds of prey" who flocked round Taliesin, Wright released an impassioned defense of Mamah to the local press in the summer of 1914, but by then it was far too late to save her. She was "noble," he explained, and "valued womanhood above wifehood or motherhood." Their life together was not hedonistic, he argued, because "the 'freedom' in which we joined was infinitely more difficult than any conformity with customs could have been. Few will ever venture it. ... You wives with your certificates for loving - pray that you may love as much or be loved as well!" AND yet, few of Mamah's closest friends and relations, watching her bond with Wright deepen, had much love to spare for her. Mamah's older sister, Lizzie, whom Mamah left to care for her children when she decamped with Wright, scorned her sister's judgment. "Do you realize what you gave up for Frank Wright?" Lizzie asks. "The kind of life most women - most feminists - dream of." Even Ellen Key, whom Mamah regarded as her mentor, sent a letter to Taliesin, urging her to leave Wright for the sake of her children. "It has been my belief and expressed philosophy that the very legitimate right of a free love can never be acceptable if it is enjoyed at the expense of maternal love," Key wrote. To Mamah (in Horan's depiction), this defection was both devastating and intellectually dishonest: "It struck her that Ellen Key's ideas were inherently self-contradictory." How could a woman who believed that staying in a loveless marriage was "tantamount to prostitution" tell her to return to one? In her response to Key (drawn from one of only 10 letters from Mamah that Horan was able to find) she explained that she had made "a choice in harmony with my own soul and what I believe to be Frank Wright's happiness." As for reuniting with her children, she added, "that cannot be just yet." Was such single-mindedness admirable or chilling? Where would this love have led Mamah, if fate had allowed it to continue? A century after pathbreakers like Emma Goldman, Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Ellen Key struggled to raise female consciousness, there is still no satisfactory answer to the question of how a woman dedicated to her own self-expression can fulfill the tradition-bound, justly demanding needs of her children when presented with a competitor for their love. The problem Ellen Key wrestled with in her philosophy, and that Mamah could not solve in her life, had no solution in 1907 and still has none in 2007. In "Loving Frank," bringing the buried truths of the ill-starred relationship of Mamah Borthwick Cheney and Frank Lloyd Wright to light, Horan only increases her heroine's mystery. Mamah Borthwick Cheney wasn't just any woman, but Horan makes her into an enigmatic Everywoman - a symbol of both the freedoms women yearn to have and of the consequences that may await when they try to take them. To most, Frank Lloyd Wright was merely misbehaving, but his lover was branded an unnatural mother. Liesl Schillinger is a regular contributor to the Book Review.

Frank Lloyd Wright, that is. First-timer Horan details the relationship between Wright and Mamah Cheney, wife of a couple lucky enough to snag him as architect of their new home. Look for a big buildup. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

"In the early 1900s, married architect Frank Lloyd Wright eloped to Europe with the wife of one of his clients. The scandal rocked the suburb of Oak Park, Illinois. Years later, Mamah Cheney, the other half of the scandalous couple, was brutally murdered at Wright's Talliesen retreat. Horan blends fact and fiction to try to make the century-old scandal relevant to modern readers. Today Cheney and Wright would have little trouble obtaining divorces and would probably not be pursued by the press. However, their feelings of confusion and doubt about leaving their spouses and children would most likely remain the same. The novel has something for everyone a romance, a history of architecture, and a philosophical and political debate on the role of women. What is missing is any sort of note explaining which parts of the novel are based on fact and which are imagined. This is essential in a novel dealing with real people who lived so recently."--"Block, Marta Segal" Copyright 2007 Booklist

Journalist Horan's debut novel reflects her fascination with the brilliant, erratic architect Frank Lloyd Wright and his scandalous love affair with a married woman and mother of two. The book capitalizes on Horan's research into both the architect's private and professional lives. The story opens when Mamah (pronounced May-Muh) Cheney, an Oak Park, Ill., woman, and her husband Edwin, a successful local businessman, contract with Frank to build their new home. Although both Frank and Mamah are married and seem content, the architect and his female client soon find they not only like being together--they must be together. Mamah, an early feminist longing for a more meaningful life, succumbs to Frank's charms as the two enter an affair that is both physical and spiritual. Soon, their relationship is the hook for all of Oak Park's gossip. After leaving their spouses, the pair flees to Europe, finding delight in a less- disapproving continental society, as well as an outlet for their cultural pursuits. Frank, father of the "prairie style" of architecture, proves a thoughtless and irresponsible businessman, but Mamah remains by his side until the couple finally quits Europe and returns home. There, Frank builds a home they call Taliesin. Eventually, Mamah makes peace with her former husband and her two children--son John and daughter Martha--who visit her at the rural estate. However, Frank's wife, Catherine, adamantly continues her refusal to grant her husband a divorce. But just when it appears that their relationship problems have lessened, a terrible and unanticipated tragedy strikes and changes forever the lives of the two lovers who were forbidden to marry. Lovers Frank and Mamah fail to generate sympathy, and the story closes with the unsubtle reminder that real life is never quite as tidy as fiction. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Horan's ambitious first novel is a fictionalization of the life of Mamah Borthwick Cheney, best known as the woman who wrecked Frank Lloyd Wright's first marriage. Despite the title, this is not a romance, but a portrayal of an independent, educated woman at odds with the restrictions of the early 20th century. Frank and Mamah, both married and with children, met when Mamah's husband, Edwin, commissioned Frank to design a house. Their affair became the stuff of headlines when they left their families to live and travel together, going first to Germany, where Mamah found rewarding work doing scholarly translations of Swedish feminist Ellen Key's books. Frank and Mamah eventually settled in Wisconsin, where they were hounded by a scandal-hungry press, with tragic repercussions. Horan puts considerable effort into recreating Frank's vibrant, overwhelming personality, but her primary interest is in Mamah, who pursued her intellectual interests and love for Frank at great personal cost. As is often the case when a life story is novelized, historical fact inconveniently intrudes: Mamah's life is cut short in the most unexpected and violent of ways, leaving the narrative to crawl toward a startlingly quiet conclusion. Nevertheless, this spirited novel brings Mamah the attention she deserves as an intellectual and feminist. (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved