A revelatory life of Clover Adams, casting a lens on her iconic marriage to historian Henry Adams and her fatal embrace of photography in her last months.

The Five of Hearts, who first gathered in Washington in the Gilded Age, included Henry Adams, historian and scion of America's first political dynasty; his wife, Clover, gifted photographer and tragic victim of depression; John Hay, ambassador and secretary of state; his wife, Clara, a Midwestern heiress; and Clarence King, pioneering geologist, entrepreneur, and man of mystery. They knew every president from Abraham Lincoln to Theodore Roosevelt and befriended Henry James, Mark Twain, Edith Wharton, and a host of other illustrious figures on both sides of the Atlantic.

Examines the women of the Adams family including Abigail and Louisa Adams, their sisters, and daughters, and describes how they lived and thought in the years between 1750 and 1850.

"Although rooted in history, Refinements of Love is a novel of mystery and elegance and powerful fascination. Neither history nor Henry Adams ever revealed the truth about the strange death in 1885 of Adams's wife, Clover, in their home on Lafayette Square, within walking distance of the White House." "In his classic autobiography. The Education of Henry Adams, this grandson and great-grandson of presidents did not even mention his wife's name or discuss the years of their marriage. Yet Clover Adams's death from poison was a notorious Washington scandal." "The Adamses were at the center of society in the nation's capital; both politicians and literati coveted invitations to their famous salon. Clover's sudden death shocked her contemporaries and continues to fascinate people more than a hundred years later. In a sparkling and dramatic blend of fact and fiction, Sarah Booth Conroy recreates the strange life and mysterious death of Clover Adams and comes up with an astonishing theory regarding its cause." "Secretary of State John Hay called Clover a "bright, intrepid spirit" with "a keen, fine intellect." And he praised her "lofty scorn of all that was mean" and her "social charm" that made the Adamses' home "such a one as Washington never knew before..." Henry James, novelist and friend, declared her "a Voltaire in petticoats." Was Clover's "touch of genius," as James called it, in an age when women's independence was corseted by social custom, responsible for her death?" "In Conroy's enchanting novel of Washington during the Gilded Age, the grand houses, opulent balls, and great art collections form a glittering veneer that masks a dark and sinister reality."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

A “marvelous…compelling” (The New York Times Book Review) biography of literary icon Henry Adams—one of America’s most prominent writers and intellectuals, who witnessed and contributed to the United States’ dramatic transition from a colonial society to a modern nation. Henry Adams is perhaps the most eclectic, accomplished, and important American writer of his time. His autobiography and modern classic The Education of Henry Adams was widely considered one of the best English-language nonfiction books of the 20th century. The last member of his distinguished family—after great-grandfather John Adams, and grandfather John Quincy Adams—to gain national attention, he is remembered today as an historian, a political commentator, and a memoirist. Now, historian David Brown sheds light on the brilliant yet under-celebrated life of this major American intellectual. Adams not only lived through the Civil War and the Industrial Revolution but he met Abraham Lincoln, bowed before Queen Victoria, and counted Secretary of State John Hay, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, and President Theodore Roosevelt as friends and neighbors. His observations of these powerful men and their policies in his private letters provide a penetrating assessment of Gilded Age America on the cusp of the modern era. “Thoroughly researched and gracefully written” (The Wall Street Journal), The Last American Aristocrat details Adams’s relationships with his wife (Marian “Clover” Hooper) and, following her suicide, Elizabeth Cameron, the young wife of a senator and part of the famous Sherman clan from Ohio. Henry Adams’s letters—thousands of them—demonstrate his struggles with depression, familial expectations, and reconciling with his unwanted widower’s existence. Offering a fresh window on nineteenth century US history, as well as a more “modern” and “human” Henry Adams than ever before, The Last American Aristocrat is a “standout portrait of the man and his era” (Publishers Weekly, starred review).

Sheila Adams has been performing Appalachian ballads and telling stories for over twenty years. A native of Madison County, North Carolina, she was introduced to the tale-telling tradition by her great-aunt "Granny,'"well-known balladeer Dellie Chandler N