Michael O'Brien (5) (1948–2015)

I wanted to read this book because I’ve long been fascinated by Louisa Catherine Adams, one of the most complex first ladies the United States ever had. She was born in London and grew up there and in France. Given the nativism that is such a constant factor in American political life, this made her suspect. Her supposed foreignness was compounded by being married to John Quincy Adams, offspring of John Adams, the second president. Neither the poverty nor the plain habits of the Adamses could shake the public perception that the family had aristocratic pretensions. And since her husband was tapped for a series of diplomatic assignments, much of her married life was spent abroad, until he became Secretary of State in the Monroe administration. This added to the suspicion that she wasn’t sufficiently American.
One more factor ensured that hers would be a complicated life: For all his ability and admirable qualities, it wasn’t easy to be married to John Quincy Adams.
Louisa took to writing in her later years (she had always loved reading and visiting the theater). One book she published was an account of the forty-day journey she undertook in the Napoleonic wars’ waning days. Her husband had left his post as Ambassador to Russia to negotiate the peace treaty after the War of 1812, leaving his wife and their son behind. In the depth of winter, she set out to rejoin him in Paris.
This incident forms the basis of O’Brien’s book. Her account is sketchy and, as she was aware, inaccurate in many details because her diary was incomplete. O’Brien fleshes out her account. His research establishes the route she probably took from St. Petersburg through Berlin to Paris. In addition, he uses incidents of the journey to fill in the back story of her life. For instance, in Chapter Five, her uncertainty about whether John Quincy would be at the border when she entered France becomes the jumping-off point to describe the ups and downs of their marriage.
When I say that O’Brien fleshes out Louisa’s account, that’s an understatement. I admire all the research the author has done, but did he need to include everything he found out about every town she passed through and everyone she met (as well as a few she didn’t meet)? I almost bailed in Chapter One, when the account of Louisa’s experiences at the Czar’s court includes the names of every architect who built every building in the royal complex. The ostensible purpose is to speculate on “what she felt” (a phrase repeated three times in the first chapter alone), although that purpose might have been served better by describing what she would have seen, rather than citing the year each building was built. Granted, a historian should ascertain all these things, but he doesn’t need to share it all.
Still, I’m glad I read the book, although I feel it would have been more effective if the text had been trimmed by at least twenty percent.
O’Brien doesn’t overemphasize one thing the story signifies, although he does point it out. In an age when women were thought inferior to men (an assumption John Quincy shared and which Louisa didn’t totally reject), she was aware that the resourcefulness and resolve she had to display to master the challenges and dangers of this journey not only served to show what she was capable of, but of what women in general were.… (meer)

I found this incredibly tedious. The through line of Mrs. Adams travel from St. Petersburg to Paris was constantly derailed by other stories, sometimes of Mrs. Adams life and marriage but other times of how may times they moved and to where or what kinds of monetary units were used in different areas or, most irritating, guessing what actually happened based on other traveller's experiences. That doesn't even go into diversions of no connection whatsoever to any part of the story. A frustrating and dissappointing read/listen.… (meer)

Michael O'Brien's Mrs. Adams in Winter (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010) is the gripping story of Louisa Catherine Adams' forty-day trek across Europe in February-March 1815, from St. Petersburg to a rendezvous with her husband (John Quincy Adams) in Paris. O'Brien has meticulously retraced Adams' journey, using not only her later memoirs but also letters, guidebooks and other evidence (useful in certain cases where Mrs. Adams' memories weren't entirely accurate). O'Brien outlines the modes of travel, customs and traffic regulations, local currencies and scenaries LCA likely experienced, as well as providing fascinating details about where she likely stayed, who she encountered during the trip, &c.

But this is much more than a travelogue. O'Brien takes various opportunities during the trip to diverge from the narrative (sometimes at length) and look forward and back in time through Louisa's life, exploring her family history, her complicated and often difficult courtship and marriage with John Quincy Adams and the overall dynamic of marrying into the Adams family. LCA suffered perhaps even more trials and tribulations that most women of her time, living for long stretches in foreign places, in forced separation from some or all of her children and relatives, suffering through multiple miscarriages, plus the death of her only daughter. The trial represented by this journey across war-ravaged Europe with only a young child and elderly servant (plus various others at stages along the way) was only one of a great many, and she was forced to make decisions that, she knew, could easily have cost her life and that of her precious child.

The challenges and dilemmas were real: cross the ice-blocked river? push on through the night in the face of dangerous roads and possibly untrustworthy guides? Keep going or change course when faced with the sudden tumult of Napoleon's return from exile in the waning days of the trip?

In presenting the story the way he has, O'Brien took something of a risk himself, but he pulls off the gambit nicely, tempering the monotony of the road with stories of court life, family struggles, and daily existence for a spirited woman of her times.

As Woody Holton recently did for LCA's mother-in-law in Abigail Adams, Michael O'Brien does here for Louisa herself. A fine book indeed.

[Note: in the interests of full disclosure, Mr. O'Brien did much research at my place of employment, and acknowledges several of my coworkers for their assistance with the book.]

http://philobiblos.blogspot.com/2010/03/book-review-mrs-adams-in-winter.html… (meer)