Clover Adams : a gilded and heartbreaking life
Clover, an inquisitive, loving, fiercely intelligent Boston Brahmin, married at 28 the older and soon-to-be-eminent historian Henry Adams. She thrived in her role as an intimate to political insiders in Gilded Age Washington, D.C., where she was valued for her wit and taste by such artistic luminaries as Henry James and H.H. Richardson. Clover so clearly possessed, as one friend wrote, "all she wanted, all this world could give." And yet there is a mystery: why did Clover, having embarked on an exhilarating self-taught course of photography in the spring of 1883, end her life less than three years later by drinking from a vial of a chemical she used in developing her own photographs? The answer is revealed through the author's original discoveries regarding the thirteen-year Adams marriage, and in Clover's photographs. The aftermath of Clover's death is equally compelling. The author illuminates Clover's enduring stature as a woman betrayed as she untangles the complex truth of her shining and impossible marriage