Clover Adams

March 19, 2012
Clover Adams, wife of historian Henry Adams (a great-grandson and grandson of American presidents John Adams and John Quincy Adams, respectively), spent time with "a wide array of writers and artists, politicians and dignitaries, doctors and academics." She "poured her energies and ambition into Henry's work," collected art, read widely, and traveled often. She was not, however, without her own preoccupations and worries. In this substantial biography, Dykstra sheds light on Clover's remarkable life and her unfortunate suicide at 42, when she drank potassium cyanide, a chemical crucial to her nascent passion for photography, selected prints of which are published here. "With her camera, she recorded her world for herself and for others to see, and in less than three years, her collection would grow to 113 photographs arranged in three red-leather albums." By studying these images, as well as notebooks and correspondence over the years, Dykstra distills insight on her subject's beliefs and emotions. Though she sometimes relies too heavily on the letters themselves (primarily those from Clover to her father), she manages to re-create a compelling story. With empathy and compassion, she gives voice to a woman nearly written out of existence. After Clover's death, Henry "almost never spoke of her and did not even mention her in his Pulitzer Prize-winning autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams." With this volume, Dykstra provides Clover's life renewed significance. B&W photos.

November 15, 2011
A scholar's debut recounts the life and troubling death of a Gilded Age woman. In the Rock Creek Cemetery in Washington, D.C., a brooding, bronze figure marks the too-early grave of Marion Hooper "Clover" Adams (1843–1885), known, if at all, to posterity as the wife of a distinguished man and as a suicide. This shrouded, enigmatic Saint-Gaudens masterpiece appears almost to warn off biographers intent on probing the puzzle of Clover's life. But Dykstra (English/Hope Coll.) proceeds boldly and supplies us with all the recoverable details, even if the mystery remains. A child of privilege in Transcendental Boston, Clover received the best progressive education then available to young women. She came of age during the Civil War, bold, athletic and passionate about art, reading and foreign languages. She charmed the likes of John Hay, Clarence King, Henry James and, of course, her husband, the celebrated professor, editor and historian Henry Adams, the direct descendant of two presidents. (Indeed, both Henrys modeled characters in their novels, at least in part, on her.) Though she confidently presided over a Washington home that sparkled with wit, 13 years into her marriage she swallowed a lethal chemical used in her photography, a three-year-old avocation for which she was beginning to develop a reputation. Why? Dykstra finds shadows in Clover's seemingly enviable life: the early death of her poet mother (Clover was only five), the suicide of a favorite aunt and the unusual closeness between Clover and her physician father who died only months before she took her own life. Clover's childlessness and the infatuation of her husband with a pretty, young and unhappily married friend may also have contributed to the overwhelming depression that marked her final months. Relying on letters and photographs, even the placement of pictures in an album, Dykstra teases all this out, occasionally appearing to over-read clues to Clover's inner life. Is it significant that Clover used one of the tools of her art to kill herself, or was potassium cyanide merely the death-dealing agent closest to hand? The curtain at least partly raised on a charmed and haunted life.

(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

October 1, 2011

Dykstra sets out not only to write a biography of Clover Adams, wife of the redoubtable Henry and a luminary who dominated Gilded Age Washington, DC, but to solve the mystery surrounding her death. Adams, who had begun enthusiastically teaching herself photography, killed herself in 1885 by drinking potassium cyanide, a chemical used in developing film. Dykstra investigates the Adams's 13-year marriage to determine what went wrong. Highlighted at the Librarians Shout and Share at BEA; I'm anticipating a fresh and absorbing read about someone not that well documented.

Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

January 1, 2012
An exceptionally bright and well-educated child in a prominent Boston family, Marian Clover Hooper (184385) became a woman of vigor, wit, courage, and high intelligence. She married the prodigious writer and historian Henry Adams, and together they reigned at the epicenter of Washington society. But Clover lost her mother at a young age. Then the aunt she loved committed suicide, a path Clover was destined to follow. First-time biographer Dykstra is the first to fully trace the darkening of Clover's radiance, finding revelations in her superbly written Sunday letters to her father and in her pioneering photography. Embracing both the technical and aesthetic challenges of this new medium, Clover made brilliantly composed and emotionally saturated photographs, in which Dykstra astutely discerns clues to her despair over her childless marriage to a distant man whose prominence she helped establish but who thwarted her public success as an artist. Clover turned to her art to end her suffering, swallowing a chemical used in the developing process. Dkystra's contextually rich and psychologically discerning portrait of an underappreciated luminary is enlightening and affecting.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)