Trials of Mrs. Lincoln

In 1875, Mary Todd Lincoln, the president's widow, was declared insane by a jury and committed to an asylum. Her son Robert brought the action. Based largely on a trove of her descendants' papers, this lively popular account of Mrs. Lincoln's travails (a ""parable of man's inhumanity to woman,'' Schreiner calls it) covers the trial, her subsequent release from confinement and her final years of obscurity in Europe. The author sees Mrs. Lincoln as a much-maligned woman whose eccentric and reclusive behavior rendered her a burden to her spoiled son and an embarrassment to those preserving Lincoln's memory. A historical novelist (Angelica, etc.), Schreiner recounts the widow's frame-up at a hastily called ``trial'' with considerable drama. Photos not seen by PW. (June 3)