Louisa: The Extraordinary Life of Mrs. Adams
By Louisa Thomas, Penguin Press, 512 pages, $30
Louisa Catherine Adams lived a life that seems made for the telling. Born in London at the dawning of the American Revolution to a father who was American and a mother who was English, she spent her early years in Europe, first with her family, then as the wife of a diplomat who went on to become president, John Quincy Adams. With — and without — her husband, she travelled the world, hobnobbing with royalty, then settled in America, where she toiled to gain him the presidency. Accomplished, ambitious, socially skilled and keenly observant, she was a formidable woman with an extraordinary life, just as the subtitle of this book promises.
But perhaps the most extraordinary thing about her was her penchant for writing. She left behind not only an abundant correspondence, but also a diary, poetry, plays, fiction and — remarkably — three fragmentary autobiographical accounts, one of them detailing her adventure-laden trip from Russia to Paris in the war-torn winter of 1815, the other two recounting her experiences and thoughts. “Record of a Life”, written when she was 51, offers an idyllic version of her childhood and young adulthood; the cryptically (and somewhat forebodingly) titled “Adventures of a Nobody”, written when she was 65, chronicles the first two decades of her marriage.
Louisa Thomas, a journalist and a former editor at the now defunct Grantland, makes full use of this bounty. “Louisa: The Extraordinary Life of Mrs. Adams” offers a biography filled with interior knowledge of its subject. Louisa wrestled with her place in the world, questioning her role and importance, clashing with her hot-and-cold husband and grappling with her ambitions, often pouring out her thoughts and feelings on paper. “Louisa” tracks the course of her inner emotional life, even as it follows the ins and outs of her travels.
What emerges is a portrait of a woman who was uneasy with the contours of her world. As a diplomat’s wife in Europe, she was a republican surrounded by the baubles of monarchies, sometimes a court favourite but always something of an exotic. She was no less exotic as First Lady, her European manners proving invaluable for Washington politicking but sometimes leaving her a woman apart.
Her marriage often made matters worse; in many ways, “Louisa” is a portrait of that marriage. She and John Quincy had deep emotional bonds, but they clashed as often as they bonded. Both were strong-willed, stubborn and fiercely intelligent, but in the man’s world that was the early 19th century, when it came to battling, he usually won. He determined the whens and wheres of their life, much to her frustration, which became something darker during trips when he insisted that they leave their children behind. Indeed, children were both the joy and the heartbreak of Adams’s life. She suffered multiple miscarriages, often due, apparently, to the challenges of 19th-century travel, and outlived a daughter and two sons.
Some battles required her special talents. She was indispensable in advancing John Quincy’s bid for the presidency in 1824. Without her social skills — her strategising, her ability to win people over, her success as a hostess of glittering parties — her awkward husband would never have attained his goal. It was for good reason that Louisa referred to her presidential toiling as “my campaigne” — and for equally good reason that she bitterly complained of “being continually told that I cannot by the Constitution have any share in the public honours of my husband”. “Louisa” makes her political contributions clear, hinting at both the power and the frustrations inherent in the blurred boundaries between the public and the private, the personal and the political.
Some women may have been content with such accomplishments, but Louisa wanted more. She relished challenges, as her dash across war-ravaged Europe in the winter of 1815 makes clear. Left behind in Russia when John Quincy went off to negotiate the Treaty of Ghent, Louisa decided, at his invitation, to join him in Paris. Accompanied by a few servants and her 7-year-old son, Charles, she rumbled across battlefields, a witness to “the graphic delineations of war’s unhallowed march — that speak in thrilling language to the heart, where the tongues of men are silent”.
Drunken soldiers and lascivious tavern keepers, lost trails and thin ice: Louisa battled them all. Her later account of her trip — “Narrative of a Journey From Russia to France” — shows her pride in her accomplishment.
But her need for a sense of purpose went beyond such escapades. She struggled not only with her role in life but also with its broader meaning, yearning to be a person “who was”. Perhaps this need fuelled her autobiographical impulses, particularly her second memoir of sorts, “Adventures of a Nobody”.
It may also have deepened her continuing interest in women’s rights. “I cannot believe that there is any inferiority in the sexes, as far as mind and intellect are concerned,” she wrote to her son late in life. Although as a political wife Louisa was cautious, she was true to her convictions, as her writings attest. During the fight over a congressional gag rule in 1841, she wrote a short statement on the right of women to petition Congress. And after reading the abolitionist Sarah Grimké’s article “On the Province of Women”, she began a correspondence with Grimké.
Here, “Louisa” is somewhat wanting. With a brief two-page glance at the Grimké letters, and virtually no information on Louisa’s statement on petitioning, it leaves readers hungry for more. The same is true of her antislavery leanings and her fictional writings; we want more.
Such lapses point to one of the book’s weaknesses. At times it feels too interior. More historical context and outside perspectives — contemporary observations and comparisons with contemporaries — would help readers see Louisa as others saw her and place her in the broader world that helped define her. Was this wife of an antislavery champion unusually frank in grappling with the problem of slavery? “Louisa” suggests as much. “Unlike most white Americans in the 1830s,” we’re told, “she tried to face and understand her fears” about a war over slavery — a generalisation that makes it hard to judge her thoughts as they existed in her own place and time.
This isn’t to say that “Louisa” lacks any historical context. Thomas scatters it across the book, maintaining a novelistic tone throughout; indeed, it is a pleasure to read. It is also well grounded in the abundant writings of Louisa, John Quincy and his parents, John and Abigail.
Marrying into the demanding and overachieving Adams family was no easy thing. “I hourly betrayed my incapacity,” she wrote, fearful that she seemed not fit “to be the partner of a man, who was evidently to play a great part on the theatre of life”. Through skilful use of her writings, “Louisa” shows how she managed this difficult transition, forging a relationship with her formidable in-laws that deepened over time.
Perhaps most striking of all, “Louisa” manages the difficult balance of exploring her life as the partner of a prominent public man without letting him hijack the narrative. Though her relationship with John Quincy is at the heart of the book, she remains front and centre. This biography, Thomas tells us, is “a history of feelings as well as facts, of questions as well as answers, of doubt as well as certainty”. The same might be said of any good biography. But for Louisa Adams, feelings, questions and doubt formed the core dynamic of her life, and “Louisa” admirably captures that murky mental landscape. In doing so, it fulfils one of her innermost goals: it shows her to be a woman who was.
–New York Times News Service
Joanne Freeman’s next book, “The Field of Blood”, explores physical violence in the United States Congress in the decades before the Civil War. She is a professor of history at Yale University.
