When writing his autobiography in the late 1800s, Henry Adams, grandson of the former Presidents Adams, made no mention of his beloved wife of 13 years, Clover. Because the Adams' have gone down in history as having enjoyed an idyllic marriage before Clover was suddenly driven to suicide in 1885, author Otto Friedrich was determined to find out what went wrong.

Like many works of nonfiction that attempt to center on too narrow a topic, this book was filled to the brim with a lot of extra "stuff". One would think that a biography of a historical figure could surely fill up 350-odd pages, but there really isn't a lot of interesting information on record regarding Clover. The information presented in this book that pertains to her, personally, could have filled a magazine article. The information about her husband and others that directly affected the "tragic love story and their brilliant life" could have filled an essay. The subtitle for this book should really be something much more broad. Something like: "Clover: The tragic story of the Adams' and every person they could have had the slightest conversation with or even knowledge of during America's Gilded Age."

Since I've been on a 19th century reading rampage the last couple of years, I didn't mind so much, but there really isn't a whole lot in here about Clover, herself. The timeline switched around a lot---back and forth between different generations---so that was frustrating, especially since there were so many different Charles', Henrys, Abigails, and Adams', in general. The author also repeated information and even entire quotes, especially in the last 150 pages or so.

I didn't come away liking Henry very well. In their courting days, he seemed embarrassed that he was in love with Clover. After her death, he reminded me of someone I know well of the same age---that wandering, depressed, self-preserving person with whom every conversation is full of irritating, self-deprecating humor. The regretting personality of someone who has experienced great loss and is not entirely blameless.

Still, there were endearing moments. The Adams' seemed to have a true love and deep respect for one another. It was fun to read about their honeymoon discoveries in London: seeing "Whistler's Mother" at its debut and buying a "photographic apparatus". I also like the stories of how they worked together toward common goals, like when Clover distracted the Spanish archivist so Henry could do his clandestine research. I imagine her loss was more devastating than Henry could find words for---I suppose I shouldn't judge too harshly his lack of sentimentality.

Because her suicide was mentioned very early on, I kept looking for signs of mental illness in her character but finding none. At the beginning of her last year, even, I found it hard to believe this woman would take her own life so soon. I have a hard time believing it was only the despair of losing her father that drove her to suicide. Either there was more or the author made her out to be a much stronger and more level-headed woman than she really was. ( )

I don't know much about Henry Adams, never read The Education Of. Most of what I know about the family is from a PBS series that aired about them in the Bicentennial year, and I remember Henry coming in to find his wife Clover dead, having drunk the cyanide she used in photography. Of course as someone with an interest in cemeteries I've seen pictures of the Saint-Gaudens statue that marks her grave.

This is a wonderful biography that tells the story of its subject while taking little side excursions to talk about the times, politics, fashions, and with small biographies of other characters in the story. We hear about the lives of John and John Quincy Adams; Louis Agassiz and his educator wife Elizabeth; Clover's merchant forbears; and many more.

Henry had been secretary to his father Charles Francis Adams Sr. when the latter was US Minister to the United Kingdom under Abraham Lincoln, and Henry became interested in studying diplomatic documents from Jefferson's administration. This took them to Europe before they returned to Washington and its politics. Again, I didn't know much about the post Civil War era or its politics but enjoyed learning about it: Grant's lack of leadership and corrupt administration; Hayes and Garfield who came to office through party splits and compromises - sound familiar? - Chester Arthur; more party splits that swung the Republicans from corrupt James Blaine to Grover Cleveland. And then a depression that ruined the Democratic party.

[Telling my mom about this brought forth a family story I hadn’t heard – I said something like “Grant wasn’t a good administrator but everybody loved him” and Ma said “Your great-great grandfather didn’t love him – he saw him stumbling drunk down the steps of the Cleveland city hall and lost respect for him!”]

Henry Adams wrote his autobiography in 1907, almost 25 years after Clover died, but he didn’t mention her at all. This omission was the seed for the biographer's interest in her. When she died, Adams destroyed his journals and all of their correspondence, but Clover wrote to her father every Sunday and there are many more letters to and from friends to fill them out. Friedrich is able to convincingly portray their personalities and states of mind at various times, and to analyze their marriage and motivations. Henry and Clover seem both to have been quirky people, plagued with depression and self doubt, but they suited each other – both intelligent and curious. Yet Henry wrote a privately published novel whose main character appears to have been based on Clover, and the protagonist speaks of how unattractive she is and how much he prefers the company of a younger, more attractive woman. After she died he pursued such a woman, who rebuffed him because he was married to someone else. But he also told a friend that there was only one woman he could have married, and he had married her, so he wasn’t interested in finding another wife. Who can understand anyone else's marriage?

(Ordered three more history books by this author from Powell’s...) ( )

For anyone who enjoys the genre of biography-writing, this is an excellent read by an author who understands what he's doing. I love to read biographies, and I've always said that if the book is well-written, then the subject doesn't matter all that much. Of course if you know or care something about Henry Adams (b.1838) or his wife Clover Hooper Adams (b. 1843), then this book will have an added interest beyond the excellent writing.

Many people know the Saint-Gaudens' hooded bronze sculpture that sits over the Adamses' graves in Washington's Rock Creek Cemetery. Henry Adams had the statue sculpted after his wife Clover committed suicide at the age of 43.

Clover Hooper Adams was born in Boston and privately educated at a girls' school in Cambridge. Her mother died when Clover was only five years old, a fact which may have been responsible for the extremely close relationship she had with her father all her life. It may have been her father's death that was the catalyst for Clover's suicide several months after he died; since her husband destroyed all of her letters and journals after her death, most of what is known about Clover comes from the weekly letters she wrote to her father. Before her death, she and Henry Adams lived in Washington, D.C., making room in their home on Lafayette Square across from the White House for a lively and witty intellectual salon.

Clover spent a good deal of her last years working as an amateur photographer; while she had the opportunity, she had no desire to publish her photos. The Clover Adams photography collection is housed in the Massachusetts Historical Society.

The biographer, Otto Friedrich, paints a portrait of a woman who is abrasive, hypercitical, and very bright. Henry Adams wrote a novel titled Esther the year before Clover died which is clearly based on her (and on a lot of other people he knew). His descriptions of her looks and her "mind" are certainly not flattering, but I thought this sentence was interesting, quoted in the biography: "She is interesting. She has a style of her own . . . . She gives one the idea of a lightly sparred yacht in mid-ocean; unexpected; you ask yourself what the devil she is doing there. She sails gayly along, though there is no land in sight and plenty of rough weather coming."

Friedrich includes an interesting and insightful chapter about Clover Adams's suicide, and also suicide in general. Some may find the topic morbid or depressing. I find it fascinating, and I wish we had more from Clover about her last months, much like the diaries and letters of Virginia Woolf. If you read Woolf's letters towards the last months of her life, particularly those to her sister, it's clear that Woolf knew she was descending into madness again--and she simply couldn't put her family through that one more time, particularly with the anxieties people had about the war. What Woolf also makes clear as a bell in the letters and diaries is how painful her situation was, something that people who have never exprerienced depression really don't understand--that life can be so painful with the disease that suicide actually seems like an upgrade.

I suspect that Clover knew where she was headed as well. And much as he seems to have felt a sense of guilt about his wife's death, I think it's pretty clear that there was nothing that Hal could have done or not done that would have changed things. Clover's sister would eventually throw herself in front of a train; her brother threw himself out a third-story window. Henry Adams married Clover knowing she had this "thing" in her family history (or, as his brother Charles Francis said when Henry married Clover Hooper, the whole family is crazy as bats--I'm paraphrasing, but that's pretty close).

I would rate this book as 4-star. There were draggy places where I wished that Friedrich hadn't gotten so bogged down in politics. Overall, however, it was a fascinating book, and it left me wishing that someone in 2010 would write a new biography of this fascinating woman. ( )