Love and Power in the 19th Century: The Marriage of Violet Blair

Violet Blair was born in 1848 to a prominent Washington political clan, whose family home on Washington's Lafayette Square, Blair House, is now the president's guest house for visiting heads of state. In this concise study, Laas, a historian and editor of Wartime Washington, a collection of Civil War letters written by Violet's aunt Elizabeth Blair Lee, uses Violet's extensive letters and diaries to tell the story of her unconventional 54-year marriage to Albert Janin. Violet grew up in an era when most women defined themselves as wives and mothers, submissive to and dependent upon men. But Violet was hardly typical. By her choice, she and Albert did not regularly live together; and she used her inherited wealth to provide for her own financial support. Although they were devoted to each other, their marriage was truly a partnership in which each retained practical autonomy while remaining emotionally dependent upon the other. An interesting portrait of a unique Gilded Age marriage, the book fails only by trying too hard to impose a feminist perspective that strips Blair of her uniqueness; in doing so, it downplays her profound (in fact, reactionary) political and social conservatism, and forces her into the mold of icon for women's rights, a social movement for which she evinced little support during her lifetime. 25 b&w photos. (May)