She was the wife of a president, the daughter of a literary giant, and the heiress to a fortune. Each of them lived in the glare of public attention, surrounded by wealth and influence. Yet behind the glittering surfaces of their lives, each of these women descended into a very public madness that ended in asylums, exile, or the shocking violence of the 1927 Paris shooting. Mary Todd Lincoln was born in December 1818 in Lexington, Kentucky, into a large and wealthy family that owned more than a dozen enslaved people.
Her mother died when she was six, and the arrival of a stepmother brought a childhood marked by strain. Educated in languages, music, and social etiquette, Mary moved to Springfield, Illinois in 1839, where she was known as an outgoing and witty young woman. She was courted by a rising lawyer named Abraham Lincoln. Their relationship was unusual, nearly breaking off more than once, but the couple married on November 4, 1842, after a long courtship.
Together, through the 1850s, Mary encouraged Lincoln’s ambitions, urging him toward politics and pressing him to put himself forward for the presidency. On the night he won the election of 1860, he greeted her with the words: “Mary, we are elected. ”
Mary relished the role of first lady, but the position was difficult amid the early months of the American Civil War. Many of her Kentucky relatives fought for the Confederacy, and several of her half brothers were killed in action, yet she remained a vocal supporter of the Union.
Her personality, marked by fierce tempers, mood swings, and delusions, drew criticism. Passed over for the diagnosis she might receive today, she clearly suffered from depression and probably bipolar disorder, complicated by diabetes and poor eyesight. She endured the death of her son William in 1862, and was so crushed by the loss that she could not attend the funeral. At times her erratic conduct was seen as a distraction from the business of wartime government.
But when her husband was assassinated in April 1865, held by her hand in a Washington theater, Mary’s public grief was met with widespread sympathy, including a condolence letter from Queen Victoria, who had herself lost her husband four years earlier. The tragedy of losing Abraham was followed by destitution and scandal. Although Abraham left an estate worth the equivalent of over two million dollars, Mary had always spent freely. By 1868 she was advertising in the national press for financial aid, calling herself the poor widow of a murdered president.
Publication of an intimate book by her former dressmaker, Elizabeth Keckley, further wounded her, she considered it a betrayal. The death of her son Thomas in 1871 deepened her decline. Her behavior became erratic, paranoid, and delusional. In 1875 she became convinced her only surviving son, Robert, was gravely ill, when he was not, and insisted she had been poisoned on a train.
She wandered the city with bonds sewn into her clothing once worth tens of thousands of dollars. Robert had her committed to an insanity trial. When she attempted to purchase enough laudanum to take her life, a pharmacist gave her a placebo instead. She was eventually released and spent her remaining years traveling and fading.
After a final reconciliation with her son, she died in Springfield, Illinois in July 1882 at the age of sixty-three. A similar pattern of decline followed in the story of Adèle Hugo. Born in Paris in August 1830, she was the beloved daughter of Victor Hugo, growing up as her father gained fame with The Hunchback of Notre-Dame. Her earliest romantic aspirations ended in tragedy.
In 1843 her sister Léopoldine, pregnant, drowned alongside her husband in a boating accident which utterly devastated Victor Hugo. Adèle’s own courtship with a relative, Auguste Vacquerie, the brother of that same drowned husband, came to nothing, as did her interest in a sculptor. In 1851, after her father fell out with the new emperor Louis-Napoléon, the family was forced into political exile on the Channel Islands. It was there, in 1855, that Adèle, then twenty-four, met Albert Pinson, a junior British army officer.
He courted her, proposed, and was refused, but when Adèle changed her mind, Pinson had already lost interest. Her behavior had begun to shift so strangely that it suggested some form of mental illness, possibly schizophrenia. For the next decade and a half, Adèle pursued Pinson relentlessly across the world. She followed him to England, to Ireland, and across the Atlantic to Halifax, Nova Scotia, and later to Barbados.
She visited his barracks, harassed him, and even consulted a hypnotist in the hope of forcing him to marry her. Her mental state decayed: she referred to herself as Madame Pinson, wandered the streets muttering to herself, and allowed her health to collapse. In late 1863 she wrote to her parents claiming the wedding had taken place, and her father announced the news in the local paper, but the marriage never occurred. Pinson eventually returned to Europe, married another woman, and had a child.
Only then, in 1872, did the forty-one-year-old Adèle finally give up and return to Paris, where her father, recognizing how far her mind had fallen, placed her in a series of asylums. She lived there until her death in April 1915 at the age of eighty-four, the last of her father’s children. Accounts from her later years describe a lucid woman who loved music, read Greek and Latin, and remembered fondly the cultural circles of her youth. Still, her life was consumed by the pursuit of a man who did not want her.
The only daughter of James Joyce followed a similar arc. Lucia Joyce was born in July 1907 in Trieste, Italy, into a literary family that lived in poverty and moved often. Her parents, James and Nora, did not marry until 1931. In 1920 the family settled in Paris, where James was becoming one of the most prominent writers of the era.
Lucia grew up surrounded by Picasso, Hemingway, and Stravinsky, and trained as a dancer under leading instructors. By 1928 she was performing professionally. Her talents were praised, and one critic remarked that James Joyce might one day become known as his daughter’s father. But in late 1929 she abruptly abandoned her career, saying she was not physically strong enough to continue.
Her relationship with Samuel Beckett had also collapsed; he was involved with another woman and told her he was more interested in her father’s writing. Both losses brought on a breakdown. She sought treatment in Switzerland, including at the Burghölzli clinic in Zurich, where she was treated by the psychoanalyst Carl Jung. By 1935 her condition had deteriorated sharply.
While visiting relatives in Ireland she lit a fire in the living room, tried to unbutton the trousers of male guests, and filled the house with gas at night. She disappeared to Dublin and slept in doorways for nearly a week. Her parents committed her to an asylum in the outskirts of Paris. Over the years she was moved to St.
Andrew’s Hospital in Northampton, England, where she remained for the rest of her life. Her father visited her and is believed to have drawn on her illness when writing Finnegans Wake, but her mother never saw her again after the commitment. Lucia died in December 1982, aged seventy-five. After her death, her nephew destroyed her letters and writings, and her medical records were burned.
Her family acted as if she had never existed. Then there was Alice de Janzé, born Alice Silverthorne in Buffalo, New York, in September 1899, the only child of a wealthy textile manufacturer and the niece of the Armour meat-packing family. Her mother died of tuberculosis when she was young, and her father’s guardianship was judged so unsuitable that an uncle won custody. At twenty-one she married Frédéric de Janzé, a French count and former air force pilot, and moved to Paris with him.
The couple had two daughters but little interest in raising them. They immersed themselves in the rhinestone culture of the Roaring Twenties. In 1925 they joined the notorious expatriate circle in Kenya known as the Happy Valley set, a community known less for farming than for parties, drug use, and promiscuity. Alice stood out for her beauty, her sarcasm, and her growing dependence on opium.
She had a brief affair with Lord Erroll, and then a more serious one with an English aristocrat named Raymond de Trafford. Her husband divorced her in 1927. On the 25th of March that year, in the Gare du Nord in Paris, Raymond told her he could not marry her because his Roman Catholic family would disinherit him. Hours later, as they parted at the station, she shot him in the chest, then turned the gun on herself.
Raymond survived, the bullet grazing a lung. Alice recovered quickly and was held on attempted murder charges, but when Raymond recovered he publicly insisted the shooting was an accident, saying she had been kissing him when the weapon was deflected. She was tried for assault in December 1927, and her lawyer convinced the court that chronic melancholy had made her mentally irresponsible. She received a light sentence and a fine.
Four years later, in 1932, she and Raymond Trafford did finally marry, but the marriage collapsed within months. They divorced in 1937, years after separating. The final years of Alice’s life were ones of growing isolation, loneliness, and drug abuse. In January 1941, Lord Erroll was found shot to death in his car in Kenya, a killing that has never been fully resolved.
Alice was questioned, provided a weak alibi, and never charged. She was in poor health by then, diagnosed with uterine cancer. Depressed and alone, she tried twice to take her own life in September 1941. On her second attempt she succeeded, using the same pistol she had used in the Gare du Nord shooting fourteen years earlier.
She was forty-two years old. Searches of her house turned up suicide notes and labels assigning her furniture to friends. It was a strange and violent ending to a life that had begun with every advantage. Take these three women Mary Lincoln, Adèle Hugo, Lucia Joyce, and Alice de Janzé had nothing that most people would recognize as an ordinary life.
But they all shared the same terrifying weakness under the weight of fame, fortune, and the expectations of their families, none of them were ever allowed to be anything but the madwoman behind the door. She was the wife of a president, the daughter of a literary giant, and the heiress to a fortune. Each of them lived in the glare of public attention, surrounded by wealth and influence. Yet behind the glittering surfaces of their lives, all four of these women descended into a very public madness that ended in asylums, exile, or shocking violence.
Mary Todd Lincoln was born in December 1818 in Lexington, Kentucky, into a large and wealthy family that owned more than a dozen enslaved people. Her mother died when she was six, and the arrival of a stepmother brought a childhood marked by strain. Educated in languages, music, and social etiquette, Mary moved to Springfield, Illinois, in 1839, where she was known as an outgoing and witty young woman. She was courted by a rising lawyer named Abraham Lincoln.
Their relationship was unusual, nearly breaking off more than once, but the couple married on November 4, 1842. Through the 1850s, Mary encouraged Lincoln’s ambitions, urging him toward politics and pressing him to put himself forward for the presidency. On the night he won the election of 1860, he greeted her with the words, “Mary, we are elected. ”
Mary relished the role of first lady, but the position was difficult amid the early months of the American Civil War.
Many of her Kentucky relatives fought for the Confederacy, and several of her half brothers were killed in action, yet she remained a vocal supporter of the Union. Her personality, marked by fierce tempers, mood swings, and delusions, drew criticism. She likely suffered from depression and perhaps bipolar disorder, complicated by diabetes and poor eyesight. She endured the death of her son William in 1862 and was so crushed by the loss that she could not attend the funeral.
At times her erratic conduct was seen as a distraction from the business of wartime government. But when her husband was assassinated in April 1865, held by her hand in a Washington theater, Mary’s public grief was met with widespread sympathy, including a condolence letter from Queen Victoria, who had lost her own husband four years earlier. The tragedy of losing Abraham was followed by destitution and scandal. Although Abraham left an estate worth the equivalent of over two million dollars today, Mary had always spent freely.
By 1868 she was advertising in the national press for financial aid, calling herself the poor widow of a murdered president. Publication of an intimate book by her former dressmaker, Elizabeth Keckley, further wounded her, and she considered it a betrayal. The death of her son Thomas in 1871 deepened her decline. Her behavior became erratic, paranoid, and delusional.
In 1875 she became convinced her only surviving son, Robert, was gravely ill when he was not, and insisted she had been poisoned on a train. She wandered the city with tens of thousands of dollars in bonds sewn into her clothing. Robert had her committed after a well-publicized insanity trial. When she attempted to purchase enough laudanum to take her life, a pharmacist gave her a placebo instead.
She was eventually declared competent and released. After a final reconciliation with her son, she died in Springfield, Illinois, in July 1882 at the age of sixty-three. A similar pattern of decline followed in the story of Adèle Hugo. Born in Paris in August 1830, she was the daughter of Victor Hugo, growing up as her father gained fame with The Hunchback of Notre-Dame.
Her earliest romantic aspirations ended in tragedy. In 1843 her sister Léopoldine, pregnant, drowned alongside her husband in a boating accident that devastated Victor Hugo. Adèle’s own courtship with a relative of the family came to nothing, as did her interest in a sculptor. In 1852, after her father fell out with the new emperor Louis-Napoléon, the family was forced into political exile on the Channel Islands.
It was there, in 1855, that Adèle met Albert Pinson, a junior British army officer. He courted her, proposed, and was refused, but when Adèle changed her mind, Pinson had already lost interest. Her behavior had begun to shift so strangely that it suggested some form of mental illness, possibly schizophrenia. For the next decade and a half, Adèle pursued Pinson relentlessly across the world.
She followed him to England, to Ireland, and across the Atlantic to Halifax, Nova Scotia, and later to Barbados. She visited his barracks, harassed him, and even consulted a hypnotist in the hope of forcing him to marry her. Her mental state decayed: she referred to herself as Madame Pinson, wandered the streets muttering to herself, and allowed her health to collapse. In late 1863 she wrote to her parents claiming the wedding had taken place, and her father announced the news in the local paper, but the marriage never occurred.
Pinson eventually returned to Europe, married another woman, and had a child. Only then, in 1872, did the forty-one-year-old Adèle finally give up and return to Paris, where her father, recognizing how far her mind had fallen, placed her in a series of asylums. She lived there until her death in April 1915 at the age of eighty-four, the last surviving of her father’s children. Accounts from her later years describe a lucid woman who loved music, read Greek and Latin, and remembered fondly the cultural circles of her youth.
The only daughter of James Joyce followed a similar arc. Lucia Joyce was born in July 1907 in Trieste, Italy, into a literary family that lived in poverty and moved often. Her parents, James and Nora, did not marry until 1931. In 1920 the family settled in Paris, where James was becoming one of the most prominent writers of the era.
Lucia grew up surrounded by figures like Picasso, Hemingway, and Stravinsky, and trained as a dancer under leading instructors. By 1928 she was performing professionally. Her talents were praised, and one critic remarked that James Joyce might one day become known as his daughter’s father. But in late 1929 she abruptly abandoned her career, saying she was not physically strong enough to continue.
Her relationship with Samuel Beckett had also collapsed, and he told her he was more interested in her father’s writing. Both losses brought on a breakdown. She sought treatment in Switzerland, including at the Burghölzli clinic in Zurich, where she was treated by the psychoanalyst Carl Jung. By 1935 her condition had deteriorated sharply.
While visiting relatives in Ireland she lit a fire in the living room, tried to unbutton the trousers of male guests, and filled the house with gas at night. She disappeared to Dublin and slept in doorways for nearly a week. Her parents committed her to an asylum in the outskirts of Paris. Over the years she was moved to St.
Andrew’s Hospital in Northampton, England, where she remained for the rest of her life. Her father visited her and is believed to have drawn on her illness when writing Finnegans Wake, but her mother never saw her again after the commitment. Lucia died in December 1982, aged seventy-five, the last surviving member of her immediate family. After her death, her nephew destroyed her letters and writings, and her medical records were burned.
Her family acted as if she had never existed. Then there was Alice de Janzé, born Alice Silverthorne in Buffalo, New York, in September 1899, the only child of a wealthy textile manufacturer and the niece of the Armour meat-packing family. Her mother died of tuberculosis when she was young, and her father’s guardianship was judged so unsuitable that an uncle won custody. At twenty-one she married Frédéric de Janzé, a French count and former air force pilot, and moved to Paris with him.
The couple had two daughters but little interest in raising them. They immersed themselves in the nightlife of the Roaring Twenties. In 1925 they joined the notorious expatriate circle in Kenya known as the Happy Valley set, a community known more for parties, drug use, and promiscuity than for farming. Alice stood out for her beauty, her sarcasm, and her growing dependence on opium.
She had a brief affair with Lord Erroll, then a more serious one with an English aristocrat named Raymond de Trafford. Her husband divorced her in 1927. On March 25 of that year, in the Gare du Nord in Paris, Raymond told her he could not marry her because his Roman Catholic family would disinherit him. Hours later, as they parted at the station, she shot him in the chest, then turned the gun on herself.
Raymond survived, the bullet grazing a lung. Alice recovered quickly and was held on attempted murder charges. Raymond then publicly insisted the shooting was an accident, saying she had been kissing him when the weapon was deflected. She was tried for assault in December 1927, and her lawyer convinced the court that chronic melancholy had made her mentally irresponsible.
She received a light sentence and a fine. Four years later, in 1932, she and Raymond Trafford did finally marry, but the marriage collapsed within months. They divorced in 1937. The final years of Alice’s life were ones of growing isolation, loneliness, and drug abuse.
In January 1941, Lord Erroll was found shot to death in his car in Kenya, a killing that has never been fully resolved. Alice was questioned, provided a weak alibi, and never charged. She was in poor health by then, diagnosed with uterine cancer. Depressed and alone, she tried twice to take her own life in September 1941.
On her second attempt she succeeded, using the same pistol she had used in the Gare du Nord shooting fourteen years earlier. She was forty-two years old. Searches of her house turned up suicide notes and labels assigning her furniture to friends.
It was a strange and violent end to a life that had begun with every advantage.