‘Clover Adams: A Gilded
and Heartbreaking Life’
by Natalie Dykstra
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 318 pp., $26
When Clover Adams killed herself, she seemed like a woman who had everything — wealth, connections, a brilliant husband and emerging artistic promise. No less a literary light than Henry James dubbed her a “Voltaire in petticoats,” an apt label for a woman with a fine mind and the hospitality to attract America’s best and the brightest to her parlor in the nation’s capital after the Civil War.
So what possessed a privileged woman in her prime to commit suicide? And, more to the point, why does a life known best for its dramatic end prove such an irresistible draw?
In “Clover Adams: A Gilded and Heartbreaking Life,” Natalie Dykstra becomes the latest in a string of biographers to ask those questions. Her book, complete with photos that show us both Clover’s world and also the world she saw through her camera lens, is an engrossing account that dwells on the sexism of late 19th-century America while pointing to an even more obvious cause for Clover’s demise.
Brain chemistry, not hormones: As Dykstra shows us, the history of depression in Clover’s family was so well known that when Henry Adams, the historian and descendant of two U.S. presidents, announced he was engaged to Clover Hooper, his brother blurted out, “Heavens! — no! — they’re all crazy as coots.”
This uncharitable remark echoes through the book. And yet, despite her exploration of Clover’s delicate mental health, the author keeps defaulting to the feminist angle. Here she follows the trail blazed by Jean Strouse’s superb 1980 biography of Alice James. Alice, Clover’s friend, was the sister caught between a controlling patriarch and two gifted male siblings (the above-mentioned Henry and the philosopher William). In Strouse’s reading, she responded by never marrying and becoming an invalid.
But Clover wasn’t Alice: Although traumatized by losing her mother to tuberculosis at the age of five, she had a kind, relatively enlightened father who ensured her excellent education. He even allowed her to travel alone.
By the time she wed fellow Boston Brahmin Henry Adams, Clover seemed a self-possessed 28-year-old. They were not an attractive couple — he too short and she too plain. But they were intellectually compatible and, during their 13 years together, shared a life of study, European travel and elegant friends.
As the years passed, however, Clover’s failure to conceive and Henry’s flirtation with one of their younger friends may have eroded her self-confidence.
Clover channeled her discontent into photography, pictures Dykstra searches for clues to her unhappiness. When she declined the offer to have one of her portraits appear in a leading magazine, citing “our modesty,” Dykstra accuses Henry: “She had internalized his standards for feminine self-restraint … She didn’t dare stretch these limits in any way that would risk Henry’s disapproval. According to him, a woman’s mind — ‘thin, wiry, one-stringed’ — was not improvable.”
True, Henry was a product of his class and upbringing. But both he and Clover do not lend themselves to easy analysis (see his autobiographical “The Education of Henry Adams” for evidence). Like their friends, the Adamses’ impeccable pedigrees and sterling resumes were no bulwark against the conventions of the day or their own self-doubt.
Prone to sadness, Clover fell into a worrying depression after her father’s death in the spring of 1885. Others failed to intervene. Seven months later, she killed herself by drinking the chemical used to develop her photographs.
Henry marked her grave by commissioning a bronze statue that has become a tourist attraction in Washington, D.C. He never married again.
Ellen Heltzel is a Portland writer.