"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

This lively and authoritative volume makes clear that the quest for taste and manners in America has been essential to the serious pursuit of a democratic culture. Spanning the material world from mansions and silverware to etiquette books, city planning, and sentimental novels, Richard L. Bushman shows how a set of values originating in aristocratic court culture gradually permeated almost every stratum of American society and served to prevent the hardening of class consciousness. A work of immense and richly nuanced learning, The Refinement of America newly illuminates every facet of both our artifacts and our values.