Word: journeyers
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...mother, who began to pine for death herself: “I feel that all my wishes center in the grave,” she wrote in her diary. To this haunting episode, O’Brien attributes Louisa’s determination to complete her epic journey alone, three years later. But it also allows the author to complicate his impression of John Quincy Adams, who for once grew distracted from politics, and grieved deeply for his daughter. O’Brien quotes from a letter written to his mother, Abigail Adams, in which he describes the child?...
...turned woman of business,” remarked Louisa Catherine Adams in January 1815, having received a letter from her husband, John Quincy Adams, inviting her to make the journey from Saint Petersburg to Paris. Her husband had not specified a time limit, but Mrs. Adams began making arrangements for her immediate departure, accompanied by her seven-year old son. She was thrilled to be leaving Russia after having suffered the wearying expense of expatriate living, the oppressive politesse required by her regular engagements at the Tsar’s imperial court, and six years of seemingly endless winters...
...Adams in Winter: a Journey in the Last Days of Napoleon,” against the background of Adams’ troubled marriage and peripatetic life as a diplomatic wife, British historian Michael O’Brien marshals an impressive array of sources in order to recreate Mrs. Adams’ journey across Europe. The result is an agreeable mix of biography, travelogue, and historical narrative—a book whose form is as hybrid as its subject. O’Brien describes Louisa Catherine Adams as “migrant, transnational, bicultural, bilingual,” and proposes...
...Brien sensitively profiles the relationship between Mrs. Adams and her husband, who became the sixth president of the United States a decade after Louisa made her journey through Europe. For most of his career, John Quincy Adams was deeply involved in his recreational study of the classics, of “Tacitus and Cicero, Massillon and Madame de Stael, the Bible and Milton”—often to the detriment of his relationship with his wife. Ever since their courtship and marriage in 1797, his bookishness and introversion had sat uncomfortably with his wife’s disposition...
...Brien’s restrained prose prevents the emergence of the lyricism or deep meditation from which his account could benefit. Nevertheless, “Mrs. Adams in Winter” is an informative and diverting—if not engrossing—read. Towards the end of the journey, O’Brien describes the provenance of his most valuable source, Louisa Catherine Adams’ own memoir of the journey, which she wrote down twenty years later, in 1836. Having encountered numerous obstacles to remembering, she was the first to concede its unreliability: “those...