Martha Borthwick

Martha Borthwick (1911)

Martha "Mamah" Bouton Borthwick (born June 19, 1869 in Boone , Iowa , † August 15, 1914 in Spring Green , Wisconsin ) was an American librarian and translator . She was best known for her relationship with the architect Frank Lloyd Wright , which ended with Borthwick's murder by the domestic servant Julian Carleton.

Life

Martha Borthwick was born on June 19, 1869 in Boone, Iowa, as the daughter of railroad machinist Marcus Smith Borthwick (born December 18, 1828 in Albany County , New York, † April 21, 1900 in Cook County , Illinois) and his wife Almira A. Bowcock Borthwick (born January 19, 1839 - January 28, 1898 in Cook County , Illinois). Martha Borthwick had two sisters, Jessie Octavia Borthwick Pitkin (* 1864, † 1901) and Elizabeth Viletta Bouton Borthwick. When her father became assistant repairs director for the Chicago and North Western Railway , he and his family moved to Oak Park .

Martha Borthwick studied languages ​​and literature at the University of Michigan and graduated in 1892. During her studies she met her future husband Edward Cheney (born June 13, 1869, † December 18, 1942), who studied electrical engineering at Michigan University. After graduating, she worked as a librarian in the library in Port Huron , Michigan.

In 1899, after the death of her mother, she moved back to Oak Park and married Edwin Henry Cheney there. From then on she was called Martha Borthwick Cheney. After their sister Jessie died in 1901 giving birth to their first child, Martha and Edwin took their daughter Jessie Borthwick Pitkin Higgins (* 1901, † 1983) into their household. Martha Borthwick Cheney gave birth to her son John in 1902 and daughter Martha in 1905. Martha Borthwick attended literary seminars at the University of Chicago , among others with Robert Herrick .

Affair with Frank Lloyd Wright

Edward Cheney commissioned architect Frank Lloyd Wright to build a house for the family in Oak Park in 1903 after Martha Borthwick met Cheney Wright's wife, Cathrine, at a local women's club. The single story house was completed in June 1904 and is now known as the Edward H. Cheney House . It had a granny flat in the basement, where Martha's sister Elizabeth Bouton Borthwick lived.

Martha Borthwick Cheney began an affair with Frank Lloyd Wright, which the two initially kept a secret. In 1909, however, both left their respective spouses and traveled to Europe together. Wright officially justified the trip with a visit to the publisher Ernst Wasmuth in Berlin, with whom he worked on a book about his architectural designs in the years 1893 to 1909 on the mediation of Kuno Francke , professor of aesthetics at Harvard University . Most of the time the couple lived in Fiesole , near Florence. Martha Borthwick, who was already using her maiden name at that time, began to work on the translation of the book The Morality of Woman by the Swedish feminist and suffragette Ellen Key from Swedish into English. After Wright returned to America in 1910, Borthwick traveled to Sweden to meet with Ellen Key.

After returning to America, the couple was condemned among acquaintances and in public for the openly exercised extramarital relationship. Wright's wife Catherine also refused to consent to a divorce. The scandal damaged Wright's reputation considerably and for an extended period of time, so that he did not receive any major contracts for several years. Because of the hostility in Oak Park, where the local press accused him of bringing shame to the place, Wright decided to build a house in Spring Green , Wisconsin and live there with Martha Borthwick Cheney. His family came from this area and he asked his mother to buy him a piece of land there.

Wright and Borthwick moved into the sprawling Taliesin house in late 1911 . This also served Wright as a studio. He lived here for two and a half years with Martha Borthwick, who continued to work on the translation of Ellen Key's writings.

Edwin H. Cheney agreed to the divorce in August 1911, but was awarded custody of the two children they shared.

death

While Frank Lloyd Wright was in Chicago overseeing the construction work on Midway Gardens , the black servant Julian Carleton killed Martha Borthwick and her two children on August 15, 1914, who were visiting their mother during the summer holidays on Taliesin and were with them he had lunched on the terrace of the house with an ax. He had previously boarded up the shutters of the dining room where six of Wright's employees were eating lunch. After the murder of Martha and her two children, he bolted the dining room door from the outside and set a fire in Taliesin's living quarters. He killed the men fleeing from the fire through the broken windows one by one with an ax.

The perpetrator Carleton and his wife had been hired by Wright as a domestic servant and cook just a few months earlier. Among the victims were Martha Borthwick, her two children, John and Martha, as well as a gardener, the coachman Emil Brodelle, an employee and the son of an employee. Only two people survived the disaster. Carleton fled after the crime, hid in the vicinity and swallowed hydrochloric acid to kill himself. But he was found alive by residents of the nearby village who rushed over and almost lynched him. Instead, he was taken into police custody and taken to Dogville Prison, where he died of emaciation seven weeks after the crime despite medical care. The motive for the act could never be clarified.

Frank Lloyd Wright was informed of the massacre by telephone and immediately traveled from Chicago to Spring Green with his son John, who had worked with him on the Midway Gardens construction site. On the same train, Edwin Cheney, who had also been informed of what was going on, was on the train.

Mamah Borthwick was buried in the graveyard of the nearby Unity Chapel, which Wright designed for Jenkin Lloyd Jones.

Frank Lloyd Wright rebuilt the property, which was largely destroyed by the fire started by Carleton, under the name Taliesin II , but which was again badly damaged by a fire in April 1925.

reception

The writer TC Boyle describes in his twelfth novel The Women. the life of the architect Frank Lloyd Wright from the point of view of a fictional Japanese assistant and the four women, including Martha Borthwick, who had a decisive influence on his life.

The relationship between Martha Borthwick and Frank Lloyd Wright is the subject of the 2009 novel Loving Frank by Nancy Horan. The book was published in 2011 under the title Kein Blick zurück in German translation.

Frank Lloyd Wright's relationship with Martha Borthwick and the Taliesin massacre are the subject of the English-language opera Shining Brow by the American composer Daron Aric Hagen, which premiered in 1993 at Madison Opera in Wisconsin .

William R. Drennan worked on the events of August 15, 1914 in the non-fiction book Death in a Prairie House: Frank Lloyd Wright and the Taliesin Murders .

plant

• Ellen Keys: The Morality of Women and Other Essays. Translated from Swedish into English by Mamah Bouton Borthwick, The Ralph Fletcher Seymour Co., Chicago 1911

Individual evidence

1. ^ Obituary in the Chicago Tribune of April 23, 1900
2. ^ WR Drennan: Death in a Prairie House: Frank Lloyd Wright and the Taliesin Murders. Terrace Books, 2007, p. 41
3. ^ William R. Drennan: Death in a Prairie House: Frank Lloyd Wright and the Taliesin Murders. Terrace Books, Madison 2008, p. 42
4. ↑ ^{a b} Mamah Borthwick Cheney. Biography on The Wright Library homepage, accessed September 8, 2015
5. ↑ ^{a b c} Mystery of the murders at Taliesin. BBC News of November 14, 2001, accessed September 8, 2015
6. ↑ The women. From the American by Dirk van Gunsteren, Kathrin Razum, Carl Hanser Verlag, Munich 2009, ISBN 978-3-446-23269-3
7. ↑ Nancy Horan: Don't look back. Insel Verlag, 2011, German by Brigitte Heinrich
8. ^ William R. Drennan: Death in a Prairie House: Frank Lloyd Wright and the Taliesin Murders . Terrace Books, Madison 2007