The Aviator's Wife
Anne Morrow is the shy, intellectual ambassador's daughter who agrees to marry Charles Lindbergh six months after meeting him in 1929, and who spends the next forty-four years being the only woman in a cockpit that is not supposed to have women in it. Melanie Benjamin's 2013 novel follows Anne from the early years of flying survey routes with Charles, to the Depression-era kidnapping and murder of their first child, to the growing politics that will, before the Second World War, publicly cast her husband as a fascist sympathizer, to Anne's own quiet reinvention as a memoirist and mother of five. Narrated in Anne's voice across a marriage she chose, survived, and eventually saw past, the book is a long meditation on the cost of sharing a life with a public man and on the private literature a wife writes for herself.
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Also by Paula McLain
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Paula McLain reimagines the life of Anne Morrow Lindbergh, from meeting Charles Lindbergh in 1927 through their flying years, the kidnapping and murder of their son, his America First politics, and his secret families.
Yes. The Aviator's Wife is fictionalized history of Anne Morrow Lindbergh, the wife of aviator Charles Lindbergh and an accomplished aviator and writer in her own right. Melanie Benjamin researched the period extensively.
The Aviator's Wife was written by Melanie Benjamin and published in 2013. The metadata above lists Paula McLain in error; McLain wrote a different historical novel about another aviator's wife.
The Aviator's Wife is a standalone novel by Paula McLain, not part of a series.
The Aviator's Wife is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
