Brian Ridden Release Date: 31 July 2008 Format: Paperback Pages: 492 ISBN: 9781425170608 ISBN-10: 1425170609
Your darling, Em tells a beautiful, inspiring love story, passionate, tender and tough. Washington Roebling knew that without his Emily he could never complete the Brooklyn Bridge. She knew that his sustained illness gave her opportunity to use her talents in exciting work. But Emily kept secrets to preserve his reputation and because her actions often flouted society's rules for educated, married women. Your darling, Em casts new light on the building of the famous bridge, exploring the intimate story of love and marriage behind the story. This is Emily's story, and she tells it as it has never been revealed before. In Your darling, Em, Washington's life-threatening disease and bridge crises plunge her into epic struggle with fear, self-doubt and courage. Determined to restore her once-virile chief engineer she becomes his nurse, secretary, adviser, emissary, detective, diplomat, publicity officer, and assistant engineer. But the more she does the more she risks emasculating him, destroying their marriage and exposing him to Bridge Board and Press. As she deals with family crises and personal grief what a staunch friend is Willie, a guileless, irrepressible romantic with quite different dreams, to whom she turns in joy and sorrow. Emily's intimate and public triumphs climax at her reception for the President of America in her husband's honor. There she expresses her deep, abiding love and her personal triumph in the secret women's language of flowers. She stands, not in her famous husband's shadow as polite society would dictate, but alongside him as equal.