Almanacs Thanks to Michael O'Brien's 'Mrs. Adams in Winter ... - Cleveland Plain Dealer

Thanks to Michael O'Brien's 'Mrs. Adams in Winter ... - Cleveland Plain Dealer

Posted: 31 Mar 2010 07:39 AM PDT

By Plain Dealer guest writer

March 31, 2010, 10:35AM

Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 364 pp., $27 By Alan Cate

Michael O'Brien calls his marvelous new book "a literary experiment" in travelogue, biography and a portrait of a marriage.

Its protagonist is Louisa Catherine Adams, wife of American diplomat, statesman and sixth president, John Quincy Adams. Reading like a novel, the narrative traces her arduous and sometimes harrowing 42-day, 2,000-mile journey from St. Petersburg to Paris in the dead of winter, 1815.

O'Brien, a prizewinning University of Cambridge scholar of American history, demonstrates an enviable mastery of the historian's craft. He melds Louisa's scattered writings, contemporary travelers' memoirs, almanacs and even imaginative literature by writers such as Alexander Pushkin to vividly re-create her experience.

Louisa departed on her 40th birthday after her husband summoned her to Paris. She climbed into a lumbering, horse-drawn carriage, accompanied by her 7-year-old son and a small retinue of servants, including one rather sinister-seeming ex-soldier.

Traversing a landscape ravaged by the recently concluded Napoleonic wars, Louisa encountered bad roads, frightful weather, marauding troops, rumors of bandits and dark forests evocative "of a Grimm fairy tale."

O'Brien organizes this account around the major stages of Louisa's trek. Her itinerary allows him to brilliantly illuminate subjects as diverse as European universities, early 19th-century theater and the harsh life of Russian Jews. A deliciously disreputable gallery of aristocratic rakes and rou s enliven the trip -- men who regarded marital fidelity as an "eccentric foible."

More importantly, O'Brien spotlights a complex and intelligent woman, relegated to the shadows during her life -- and subsequently by historians. Born in England to an American merchant and an English mother, Louisa met her future spouse in London. She was aware of her "high social standing" but conscious that "she could not have an independent career."

Upon marrying the cold, intellectual John Quincy, the equally formidable John and Abigail Adams became her in-laws. To be sure, these two eventually warmed to her, but the plainspoken, sturdy republican Abigail in particular was initially suspicious of the lavish-living, foreign-born "Siren" who had ensorcelled her son.

As a diplomat's wife, Louisa lived as a nomad; in O'Brien's poignant phrase, "her life was measured out in packing cases." She didn't see the United States until she was 26 and remains the only first lady born overseas. The couple experienced more than their share of heartache, including four miscarriages and the later death of an infant daughter.

Louisa's and John Quincy's union seems to have been animated by respect, not passion. He was preemptory and an inveterate fault-finder and, as O'Brien makes clear, she chafed privately. Thus, her adventure offered Louisa a chance to prove to herself and her husband that, in her own words, "energy and discretion" could overcome "the fancied weakness of feminine imbecility."

Indeed they did, as Louisa repeatedly demonstrated courage and coolness.

Late in life, she penned an unpublished autobiographical fragment she titled "Adventures of a Nobody." But in O'Brien's pages the indomitable Mrs. Adams emerges as a genuine "somebody," a fascinating mix of sense and sensibility.

Alan Cate teaches history at University School in Hunting Valley.

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Almanacs

Wednesday, March 31, 2010