How will Elizabeth Edwards be remembered? As a successful lawyer, a best-selling author, or a healthcare activist? The 61-year-old, who died from cancer at her home last Tuesday, will inevitably remain best remembered as the wife of John Edwards.

It’s thanks to the former North Carolina senator and twice-failed Democratic presidential candidate that the last years of her life and their marriage were played out in the full glare of publicity after his affair with one of his 2008 campaign staff, Rielle Hunter. That there is huge sympathy for Elizabeth Edwards and her three remaining children is undoubted. She had been seen as an iconic survivor, living with the loss of her 16-year-old son Wade in a car crash in 1996, and defeating breast cancer diagnosed in 2004. But in 2007, her cancer had not only returned but spread to her bones.

It wasn’t just her decision to continue campaigning for Edwards while so seriously ill that some criticised as a cynical political ploy, but the revelations elsewhere that her ‘family values’ presidential hopeful was also a hypocrite. Last January, he finally admitted to her that he was the father of Hunter’s two-year-old love child, and she filed for a divorce that still has not come through due to North Carolina’s law requiring a year’s prior separation.

Commentators were compelled to pass judgement on the behaviour of not just Edwards himself, but of his terminally ill wife. And the consensus was that she should have known better.

Taylor Marsh, a long-time Washington DC political analyst wrote earlier this year: “Elizabeth Edwards was a primary player in this modern Shakespearean tragedy, with Rielle Hunter the victor of a man not worth their sacrifices.”

Elizabeth covered for her husband, asserted Marsh, to keep his presidential hopes alive, and in so doing, put her own credibility on the line. Despite being the injured party, protecting her husband was more important than her own self-respect and put a question mark on her character – all the more unforgivable because Elizabeth Edwards was very much her husband’s intellectual superior. She was the perfect example, said Marsh, of “an abused wife who can’t let go of her abuser”.

It wasn’t always like that. When Edwards was elected to the senate in 1998, his wife was seen as his greatest political asset. They had met in the same law firm and married in 1977. When his political career took off with a slew of publicity shots, she referred to herself as the ‘anti-Barbie’ to counteract Edwards being labelled by opponents as something of a vacuous ‘Ken’. Her liberal conscience was also more evolved than his: she supported gay marriage and was opposed to the war in Iraq, issues on which both of them are said to have vehemently disagreed.

Something they did agree on, however, was using Elizabeth’s terminal cancer diagnosis to political advantage. This was one of the many sensational revelations in the book The Politician, written by the senator’s former aide and virtual right-hand man, Andrew Young. He told ABS news that “once Elizabeth was diagnosed with cancer... within 12 hours they were openly talking about how the prognosis was going to help them in the polls”.

Elizabeth Edwards denied Young’s claims, describing them as “unconscionable, hurtful and patently false”. But the evidence was there to see and their decision to stay in the 2008 presidential race, even though Elizabeth was terminally ill, was regarded as calculating.

“Nothing was sacred,” declared Young, who had worked with Edwards for over 10 years and became aware of his boss’s illicit affair with Hunter, then a campaign videographer, in 2006. His book claimed the existence of the now inevitable sex tape and also Edwards’ insistence that he [Young] claim paternity of Hunter’s baby.

“It was like watching a traffic pile-up occur in slow motion – repelling but also transfixing,” was Young’s verdict – not on Edwards’ self-inflicted fall from grace, but of the tape of the senator and a naked, pregnant Hunter.

The two women accidentally came face to face at a 2006 rally at Edwards’ Chapel Hill home while Hunter was a member of the campaign team. Young recalls showing her into a bathroom that he mistakenly believed the senator’s wife didn’t use. Elizabeth obviously had suspicions after meeting the younger woman. She challenged her husband, who confessed only to having a one-night stand, says Young, before then lying to his wife that “I had started having an affair with her after that”.

Rielle Hunter’s work contract with the campaign was terminated the next day, he claims, while Elizabeth bombarded him and his wife Cheri with phone calls, “screaming” down the line, wanting to know the truth. Ironically, her book, Saving Graces: Finding Solace and Strength from Friends and Strangers, detailing the tragic loss of her son and then her battle with cancer, had just been published.
After Hunter’s daughter, Quinn, was born in February 2008, Elizabeth told ABC news that Young was the father. Did she truly believe that? In her 2009 book, Resilience: Reflections on the Burdens and Gifts of Facing Life’s Adversities she didn’t hold back in expressing her disgust at Young, among others. “My life, at some level, is tragic. Theirs is pathetic.”

But worse was to come when Hunter gave her kiss-and-tell interview to GQ magazine in March this year, accompanied by the requisite photoshoot of her partially dressed in a shirt. Some may draw conclusions about how apt that surname is – she set her sights on Edwards and, according to her, he wasn’t exactly an unwilling target. Her first words to him, she said, were “You’re so hot.” To which he allegedly replied, “Why, thank you!”

“He almost jumped into my arms, literally,” she continued.

Whether or not the disgraced senator remains as eager a lover now is unclear. She told GQ in that interview that they are both very much in love and that she believes that their relationship will endure “until death do us part”.

Edwards was at his wife’s bedside when she died last week, along with his three remaining children, Cate (28), Emma Claire (12), and Jack (10). But there is speculation about her wish for his future involvement in their lives: she has reportedly asked that Cate take on the role of caring solely for the two youngest so that they would be able “to function without an involved, engaged parent”.

In her last interview on ABC, when asked about the unimaginable task of preparing her children for her imminent death, she said: “The most important thing you can give your kids is wings.” Perhaps she should have taken flight herself much sooner from the sham marriage to her cheating, politically ambitious husband, suggests Taylor Marsh.

“Elizabeth Edwards is a very public example of what happens when a woman puts herself behind the kind of man who will not only destroy you, but leave you also responsible for the collateral damage to the lives of others.”