Abraham Lincoln's wife was long attacked for everything from her spending to her lack of emotional restraint. But with two new plays about her, she is finally getting better press.

During last month's US presidential inauguration, as ever during these quadrennial celebrations, fierce interest focused on the First Lady. Much was made of Melania Trump's dresses, her enigmatic smiles, and especially the navy-blue wide-brimmed boater-style hat she wore for the swearing-in. Was the hat a deliberate choice, to shield her face from the prying eyes of the public? No one could say, but legions speculated.

How unenviable is the lot of the President's wife, lacking in formal power but constantly judged – expected to be immaculately turned out, and to remain, in conduct, ever above reproach. The court of public opinion has found no First Lady more wanting than Mary Todd Lincoln, wife of Abraham Lincoln. Her husband, who emancipated the slaves, and saved the union, enjoys near-universal adulation, while Mrs Lincoln has been the subject of criticism and disapproval since her first days in Washington in 1861 when she embarked on plans for a lavish redecoration of the White House. She travelled to New York for a shopping spree, and reporters followed her everywhere. One for The New York Herald wrote: "Mrs Lincoln, who has been engaged since her arrival in making large purchases at some of the leading merchants, was out yesterday enjoying herself in the usual way."

Such reports did not go down well in the besieged, wartime capital. Indeed, the loyalty of the First Lady, who hailed from a slave-holding family, and had three half-brothers in the Confederate Army, was questioned throughout the Civil War. Even after her husband was shot on 18 April 1865 by Confederate supporter John Wilkes Booth, as he sat beside her in Ford's Theater, the public didn’t embrace their hero's widow. In 1875, her own son had her committed to an insane asylum.

And yet today, in the era of TikTok, X, Instagram and Facebook, where social esteem rises and falls capriciously on clicks and likes, the maligned Mary Todd Lincoln is getting some compassionate reassessment on the stage, most particularly in Mrs President, a new play by US historian, writer and artist John Ransom Phillips opening this week at London's Charing Cross Theatre.

This two-hander centres on the relationship between Mary Todd Lincoln (played by Miriam Grace Edwards), and Mathew Brady, considered the father of American photo-journalism (Sam Jenkins Shah) who took iconic pictures of Abraham Lincoln, his family, and the battlefields of the bloody US Civil War. The new play imagines the First Lady, coming to Brady’s studio to sit for her portrait, aware that she is an object of suspicion because of her southern heritage, and seeking an "image that will define history’s view of me". Brady declares he has the power to do that. "I shape the image of people who shape America. Past. Present. Future," he says.

In Ransom Phillips' depiction, Mrs Lincoln demands to be addressed as Mrs President, and engages in an on-going verbal tug of war with Brady over how she should be portrayed. The play asks who controls the revelatory public image, the subject or the artist? This question transcends time and place, but has specific resonance for the former First Lady who sought, and believed she never received, proper recognition during her life for all she had done, and suffered. Later scenes follow Mrs Lincoln into her widowhood, and other controversial historical figures of mid-19th-Century America – abolitionist John Brown, Chief Justice Roger Taney, and naturalist John James Audubon – appear on stage, depicted by Shah. Mrs President is a daringly kaleidoscopic look at the ownership of self.

In truth, Mary Todd Lincoln and Mathew Brady's relationship was a limited one. She did pose for Brady at his studio at 625 Pennsylvania Avenue in November of 1861. When she saw the photographs, she was unhappy with how she looked and instructed that they all be destroyed, except for one she deemed "passable", in which she stands, and her face is seen in profile; Brady ignored this request and kept all the photographs in his archives. And later in Lincoln's term, she returned to the studio a few times, but it's not known if Brady........

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