Clover: The Tragic Love Story of Clover and Henry Adams and Their Brilliant Life in America's Gilded Age
by
On a bleak December morning in 1885, Clover Adams, the wife of the famed historian Henry Adams, went upstairs and swallowed poison, ending her life and thirteen years of what had seemed to everyone an idyllic marriage. Henry commissioned Augustus Saint-Gaudens to cast a statue for Clover's grave, and then, strangely, seemed to turn his back on the tragedy. He did not even mention his marriage to Clover in his classic autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams.
Haunted by Adams' silence, Otto Friedrich, himself a distinguished historian and author, began a search for Clover. Through painstaking research, he journeyed back to the Gilded Age to reconstruct the life of this spirited woman who was at its center. Slowly he uncovered the details of Clover's life and heritage - an effort that took him through the voluminous Adams Papers in Boston, to the Hay-Adams House in Washington, even to the set of the television production of the Adams Chronicles. The quest was successful. Otto Friedrich has written a superb biography, sound in its scholarship and as gripping to read as a good novel.
Clover was born in 1843 into two of Boston's oldest families, the Hoopers and the Sturgises. Friedrich explores her classical education, the involvement of her family and friends in the Civil War, and the demands placed on her as the wife of Henry Adams. A celebrated hostess, Clover counted among her friends and acquaintances several presidents, visiting luminaries such as Henry James, and many other noted artists and thinkers. James, living in England, once called her "the incarnation of my native land."
Clover Adams lived at a time when a woman's destiny was prescribed by a severe patriarchal society. In writing of her life, Otto Friedrich re-creates that society - its manners, morals and the attitudes of men toward women and women toward themselves.
Saint-Gaudens' memorial statue portrays a woman whose eyes are downcast and whose head is covered with a bronze shroud "so that it throws the face in shadow." In his own way, Otto Friedrich has removed that shadow. Clover Adams is no longer an enigmatic figure whose life has been lost to us. She is flesh and blood, a woman who loved and suffered and was an admired person in an eventful time.
Haunted by Adams' silence, Otto Friedrich, himself a distinguished historian and author, began a search for Clover. Through painstaking research, he journeyed back to the Gilded Age to reconstruct the life of this spirited woman who was at its center. Slowly he uncovered the details of Clover's life and heritage - an effort that took him through the voluminous Adams Papers in Boston, to the Hay-Adams House in Washington, even to the set of the television production of the Adams Chronicles. The quest was successful. Otto Friedrich has written a superb biography, sound in its scholarship and as gripping to read as a good novel.
Clover was born in 1843 into two of Boston's oldest families, the Hoopers and the Sturgises. Friedrich explores her classical education, the involvement of her family and friends in the Civil War, and the demands placed on her as the wife of Henry Adams. A celebrated hostess, Clover counted among her friends and acquaintances several presidents, visiting luminaries such as Henry James, and many other noted artists and thinkers. James, living in England, once called her "the incarnation of my native land."
Clover Adams lived at a time when a woman's destiny was prescribed by a severe patriarchal society. In writing of her life, Otto Friedrich re-creates that society - its manners, morals and the attitudes of men toward women and women toward themselves.
Saint-Gaudens' memorial statue portrays a woman whose eyes are downcast and whose head is covered with a bronze shroud "so that it throws the face in shadow." In his own way, Otto Friedrich has removed that shadow. Clover Adams is no longer an enigmatic figure whose life has been lost to us. She is flesh and blood, a woman who loved and suffered and was an admired person in an eventful time.