Nancy Horan lived for twenty-four years on the same Oak Park, Illinois street as one of Frank Lloyd Wright's early prairie houses, and on tour after tour of Wright's home and studio she noticed the same gap: guides talked about his buildings and his family, but almost never about Mamah Borthwick Cheney, the client whose affair with Wright scandalized the country and ended in tragedy. Loving Frank is the novel Horan spent seven years researching and writing to fill that silence, and it won the James Fenimore Cooper Prize for Best Historical Fiction, was praised by The New York Times as “truly artful fiction,” and pulled in more than 100,000 Goodreads ratings averaging 3.77 out of 5 — a number that reflects real, ongoing disagreement over whether the book's two central lovers ever earn a reader's sympathy. This review works through what critics actually said, what Horan has said about why she wrote it, and exactly where reader opinion splits.
What Loving Frank Actually Is
The novel opens in 1903, when Edwin and Mamah Cheney hire Frank Lloyd Wright to design their new home in Oak Park. Mamah, a college-educated woman fluent in several languages and hungry for intellectual life beyond raising two children in a Chicago suburb, begins an affair with Wright, who is himself married with six children. In 1909, both leave their spouses and families, scandalizing the country, and eventually settle together at Taliesin, the Wisconsin estate Wright builds explicitly for their life together. Horan tells the entire story from Mamah's point of view, tracking her intellectual awakening, her real translation work on the feminist writer Ellen Key, and the social cost the affair extracts from her specifically, in an era when a woman who left her children for another man faced a different, harsher judgment than the man beside her.
It's a genuine work of historical fiction, not straight biography: the outline of events is real and documented, but Horan imagines the private conversations, interior thoughts, and emotional texture that no historical record actually captured. She's been clear about that distinction in interviews, and it matters for how to read the book — as an informed, deeply researched act of imagination filling a real gap in the historical record, not as a claim to know exactly what Mamah thought or said.
About Nancy Horan and Why She Wrote This
Horan is a former journalist, middle school English teacher, and freelance writer who spent twenty-four years living in Oak Park, Illinois, a suburb famous for its concentration of Frank Lloyd Wright buildings. She wrote newspaper and magazine pieces on subjects ranging from invasive Asian carp to Oprah's wardrobe before eventually co-authoring a book on garden design. She took fiction-writing classes through the University of Chicago roughly eight years before Loving Frank was published, and has said the idea for the novel came directly from her own repeated visits to Wright's home and studio, where she noticed that Mamah Cheney — despite being central to one of the most consequential relationships of Wright's life — barely came up on the standard tour.
That absence became the project: Horan began researching who Mamah actually was, beyond her role as Wright's mistress in the historical footnotes. She started writing the novel in 1999 from four separate points of view before deciding, about two years in, to tell the whole story through Mamah alone, and spent a total of seven years on the book before its 2007 publication. Horan has said explicitly that she wanted to give Mamah the fuller, more specific interior life that history and Wright's own biographers had largely denied her, treating her not as a scandal attached to a famous man but as an intellectual and a person making a costly, deliberate choice.
How It Compares to The Paris Wife
Readers who've spent time with Paula McLain's The Paris Wife, about Ernest Hemingway's first marriage, will recognize the shape of Loving Frank immediately: both are historical novels narrated from the point of view of the woman standing beside a famous, difficult creative genius, both use real documented events as scaffolding for imagined interior life, and both ask readers to sit with a relationship that costs the woman at its center more than it costs the man. The key difference is where each book lands emotionally. The Paris Wife follows a marriage's slow unraveling and a woman who ultimately survives and rebuilds. Loving Frank follows an affair chosen against enormous social cost, ending in a real historical tragedy that Horan reports with restraint rather than melodrama. If McLain's book appealed to you for its portrait of a woman navigating a genius's orbit, Horan's covers similar emotional ground with a darker, more definitively tragic arc.
What Critics Actually Said
Rather than inventing a verdict, here's what was actually published about it:
“Truly artful fiction.”— The New York Times
“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.”— The New York Times Book Review
“This spirited novel brings Mamah the attention she deserves as an intellectual and feminist.”— Publishers Weekly
Not every notice was uncomplicated praise. The New Yorker's review credited Horan with avoiding a “bodice-ripper for the smart set,” but added that she “cleaves too faithfully to the sources, occasionally giving her story the feel of a dissertation masquerading as a novel” — a real, specific critique of how closely the book hews to its research. Kirkus, meanwhile, noted plainly that the two lovers “fail to generate” full sympathy, a criticism that echoes through a lot of the reader reception below.
And the aggregate reader picture, for what it's worth:
Where Real Reviews Pushed Back
The most consistent, specific reader criticism is a moral one, not a technical one: Mamah and Frank both leave spouses and, in Mamah's case, two young children, and a real portion of readers report finding it genuinely difficult to root for a love story built on that particular cost. More than one review describes the couple's self-absorption as a real obstacle to sympathy, and Kirkus's professional notice made essentially the same point. There's a separate, structural complaint too — that the middle of the book moves at a deliberately slow, careful pace that mirrors the era it depicts, which some readers found immersive and others found simply slow, wanting the doomed relationship to reach its resolution faster than the novel is willing to move. Both critiques are real and specific, not vague dismissals, and they're worth weighing before you start, since the book asks you to spend nearly 400 pages inside the emotional logic of two people whose choices it never fully lets you off the hook for judging.
On Mamah's Real Feminist and Intellectual Life
What distinguishes Loving Frank from a straightforward affair narrative is how much space it gives to Mamah's own intellectual ambitions, separate from Wright entirely. The real Mamah Borthwick Cheney was a college-educated woman who became the English translator of Swedish feminist writer Ellen Key, and Horan builds a substantial thread around that actual translation work and Key's ideas about love, marriage, and women's independence, which genuinely shaped how Mamah understood her own choices. This is where the novel does its most distinctive work: treating Mamah's affair with Wright as inseparable from a broader, documented hunger for intellectual and personal freedom that her marriage to Edwin Cheney, by her own account, simply didn't offer her.
On Frank Lloyd Wright, Fame, and the Real Taliesin
The novel doesn't romanticize Wright uncritically either. It portrays a genius who is also self-absorbed, financially reckless, and willing to let his family absorb real damage in service of his own certainty that his relationship with Mamah was correct. Taliesin, the Wisconsin home and studio he builds explicitly for their life together, becomes both a monument to that conviction and, ultimately, the site of the story's devastating real historical ending — which the book handles with restraint rather than melodrama, a choice Publishers Weekly noted forces the novel to, in its words, crawl toward “a startlingly quiet conclusion.”
Key Takeaways
- Horan spent seven years researching and writing the novel after noticing Mamah Borthwick Cheney was barely mentioned on tours of Wright's actual home and studio
- The book won the 2009 James Fenimore Cooper Prize for Best Historical Fiction, real documented recognition for its historical craftsmanship
- Reader sympathy for Mamah and Frank is a genuine, recurring point of division, echoed by Kirkus's professional review as well
- A real, substantial thread follows Mamah's actual work translating feminist writer Ellen Key, grounding the affair in her own documented intellectual ambitions
- The New Yorker's specific critique — that the book stays unusually close to its historical sources — is worth knowing if you prefer freer, more inventive historical fiction
Who This Book Is Actually For
Readers drawn to richly researched historical fiction about real, complicated women history sidelined, especially anyone interested in architecture, early-twentieth-century feminism, or the actual scandal surrounding Frank Lloyd Wright's personal life. It rewards patience and suits readers who want a slow, immersive recreation of an era over a fast-moving plot.
Who Should Read Something Else Instead
If a love story built on leaving young children behind is a hard emotional entry point for you, or if you want faster pacing and more narrative invention than a closely sourced historical novel typically allows, this may not be the right pick. Readers who want Wright's architecture without the personal scandal are better served by a straight biography or an architectural history instead.
Pros and Cons
Pros:
- Winner of the 2009 James Fenimore Cooper Prize for Best Historical Fiction, real recognition beyond popularity
- Praised by The New York Times as “truly artful fiction,” with a strong New York Times Book Review notice as well
- Gives real, substantial attention to Mamah's own intellectual and feminist work, not just her role in the affair
- Handles the historical ending with restraint rather than melodrama, per Publishers Weekly
- Deeply, visibly researched depiction of Frank Lloyd Wright's actual personal and professional life
Cons:
- Kirkus and multiple reader reviews report real difficulty sympathizing with Mamah and Frank given who they leave behind
- The New Yorker specifically flagged the novel as hewing so closely to its sources it can read like “a dissertation masquerading as a novel”
- A deliberately slow, era-matched pace that some readers find immersive and others find simply dragging
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Loving Frank based on a true story?
Yes. Mamah Borthwick Cheney and Frank Lloyd Wright's affair, and the events that followed it, are historically documented. Horan researched the real record for seven years and fills gaps in the historical account with imagined dialogue and inner thought, clearly framed as a novel rather than a biography.
What's the real Goodreads rating?
3.77 out of 5 from more than 100,000 ratings as of this writing. Check the live number yourself since it will keep moving.
Did Loving Frank win any real awards?
Yes -- it won the 2009 James Fenimore Cooper Prize for Best Historical Fiction from the Society of American Historians, real documented recognition specifically for its historical craftsmanship, not just its popularity.
Do readers find Mamah likable?
Opinion is genuinely split. Kirkus specifically noted that the lovers fail to generate full sympathy, and multiple reader reviews describe struggling to root for Mamah and Frank given the family they leave behind -- a real, recurring criticism rather than an isolated complaint.
Sources & Further Reading
- Goodreads — Loving Frank (aggregate rating, reader reviews)
- The New York Times Book Review — “Notes on a Scandal”
- Publishers Weekly — review
- Kirkus Reviews — review
- The New Yorker — review
- BookBrowse — Nancy Horan author interview
- PositiveLifes.com — free inspirational and life-changing PDF books
Final Verdict
Loving Frank earns its historical-fiction prize with genuine research depth and a real, overdue attempt to give Mamah Borthwick Cheney the interiority history denied her. The reader pushback on sympathy and pacing is real and specific, not manufactured controversy, and it's worth taking seriously if you tend to need likable protagonists or brisk plotting. But for readers who want patient, deeply researched historical fiction about a genuinely overlooked woman at the center of a famous man's story, this delivers exactly that.
Buy Day rating: 7.9/10