Martha Dandridge Custis was a wealthy, good-looking widow and the mother of two young children when, in 1759, she started a new life as Martha Washington. Thus began an ardent love affair and one of our country’s most influential partnerships. For more than forty years, Martha was the mainstay of George’s increasingly powerful, stressful life. George Washington’s career might have been very different without his marriage to his “dearest Patsy.” Her fortune ensured the success of his Mount Vernon. But much more important was the emotional support she brought to their marriage. Under his glacial exterior, George Washington was often insecure, indecisive, and prone to fits of temper. His wife was the person who truly knew and loved the complex man behind the noble mask.

Martha Washington’s name is one of the most recognizable in American history and yet Martha herself is the invisible woman in American history. She burned her private correspondence after George’s death, but with painstaking research, Patricia Brady has finally recovered the real woman from the usual bit of decorative wallpaper behind the icon that is George. Never the kindly frump of popular mythology, she was an able landowner, an indomitable patriot, and her husband’s constant confidante in military, political, and personal matters for four decades. Martha’s world extended from the Virginia plantation aristocracy into which she was born to the rugged-life battlefields of the Revolution. For eight long years, her husband stayed in the field—the only way he could hold his army together, though he was homesick and desperately worried about Mount Vernon. And every year, she came to spend months with him at Valley Forge and other winter camps, providing the loving comfort that allowed him to keep going. She then packed up and moved with him to the new capitals of New York and Philadelphia, where she used her charm and humor shrewdly to help George negotiate the churning political waters of the new country. Behind the scenes, she was at his side and on his side, particularly as political enemies like Thomas Jefferson and James Madison unleashed the most vicious of tabloid newspaper attacks against Washington

This superb work vividly portrays her remarkable life, her unusual achievements, and her great contribution to America. Because she was the first, Martha Washington had no role model, no precedent, and she set a standard for every presidential couple for the next two and half centuries.

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