Book Review: Immortal Wife

Title: Immortal Wife

Author: Irving Stone

Date: 1944

Publisher: Doubleday

ISBN: none

Length: 450 pages

Quote: “Imagine how outraged your family at Cherry Grove would be if they learned that a McDowell had married...an illegitimate child.”

Subtitled “The Biographical Novel of Jessie Fremont,” Immortal Wife is, like Clarence Darrow for the Defense, a vividly imagined work of fiction based on study of the primary documents. Irving Stone fantasized many dramatic private scenes, among real people, by reading their letters and their friends’ letters after they were dead. In the early nineteenth century people thought one way to discourage premarital pregnancy was to blame children if their parents hadn’t been married at the time of their birth. According to the law, a baby was legitimate if it was born minutes after the wedding, illegitimate if born minutes before. John Fremont, war hero, explorer, presidential nominee (as both Republican and Democrat), and husband of Jessie Benton, was born illegitimate. Jessie knew and didn’t care, since Fremont was an American earning his own money rather than a European dependent on his place in the paternal line, but from time to time through their more-than-forty-year active career people tried to embarrass both Jessie and John Fremont by revealing this “scandalous secret.”

That’s one of many fun facts about the Fremonts Stone weaves into his novel about them. John Fremont published his own memoirs of his long adventurous life. He was a popular celebrity, but, even in a period where women were supposed to want to retreat into “the home” and avoid being noticed, Jessie was if possible even more popular than John Fremont. A biography of her was written shortly after she died; Stone reviewed the evidence—letters and newspapers and so on—and improved that biography into his novel. We meet her quitting school when she was unable to get a friend elected May Queen (she’d been thoroughly homeschooled and never seen the need to go to school anyway), then see her arranging a secret marriage in a different church in order to tell her father she was married rather than asking for his approval, camping with her husband in the Western Territories, even advising President Lincoln on conditions and strategy for the West in the war.

She was not, of course, immortal. In the nineteenth century the life expectancy was less; both Fremonts died at ages that many now insist should not be described as old. They were, at least, “immortalized” by their place in the history of California and Arizona, which they helped to shape into States.

Stone had a tendency to idealize the subjects of his biographies. Vincent Van Gogh, Jack London, Eugene Debs, Rachel Jackson, Mary Todd Lincoln, and Clarence Darrow were interesting people, people you don’t meet every day—or want to; Stone wrote about them as if they were the kind of people he wanted to meet every day. Let’s just say that Jessie Benton Fremont, if not exactly a saint, was at least a smart, tough, charming, and adventurous lady, easier to admire than some of Stone’s other heroes. She consciously rejected her generation’s version of feminism as embodied by Margaret Fuller or perhaps Charlotte Corday, yet somehow she embodied a sort of proto-feminism anyway.

In Virginia, where I’ve spent most of my life, girl and woman, few people recognize Mrs. Fremont’s name. In California, where I spent just one school year, they remembered her, and held her up to little girls as a role model, rather like Martha Washington...The funny thing about that is that Jessie Benton, whose mother was a McDowell, was born in Virginia; she met John Fremont in Washington, D.C., while her father was there as a U.S. Senator.

This book was sufficiently popular in its day that the hardcover first edition is not especially hard to get, although prices are entering the collector range. What I physically have is the hardcover edition, with the pretty portrait of Mrs. Fremont on the (tattered) dust jacket. Run don't walk; in real life I'm asking less than Amazon. If willing to accept a later and cheaper reprint, you can still order this book for our standard price of $5 per book plus $5 per package plus $1 per online payment. First editions will cost $10 per book, $5 per package, $1 per online payment. Either way, at least three more books of similar size will fit into the $5 package, and those could be Fair Trade Books, so please scroll down to browse.

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