Review of Loving Frank

If you have time to read contemporary bestsellers, Loving Frank by Nancy Horan, is a new Random House Book Club selection and is available at Target. It is a piece of historical fiction, (and it's GOOD) about Mamah Borthwick Cheney who met Frank Lloyd Wright in Oak Park, Illinois, when he designed a house for Mamah and her husband. Frank and Mamah ended up falling in love and left their families to be with each other in the early 1900's. They were both inspired, educated, artistic people... Mamah had received a Master's degree in library science from the University of Michigan and was fluent in at least 4 languages. In many ways, she felt liberated by her relationship with Frank, despite the intense fall-out. They were expatriates in Europe for awhile. There, Mamah read and then met a Swedish feminist philosopher whose writings Mamah became a translator of because she felt that the feminist's ideas were important for the suffrage movement in the US.


Much of the story is set in southwest Wisconsin where Wright built Taliesin for he and Mamah. They made their home where Wright's family was from, despite the intense media scandal that followed their relationship. Wright was a descendant of Unitarians who had fled religious persecution in Wales. His philosophy of life, art, and nature was influenced by his Unitarian background, and the historical novel can be beautifully rhapsodic about the inspiration he drew from the prairie landscape.