Mrs. Adams in Winter: A Journey in the Last Days of Napoleon

Beginning her nearly solitary winter trek from St. Petersburg to Paris in 1815, Louisa Adams experienced 40 days of independence from the constrictions she suffered as wife to future American president John Quincy Adams. Recounting her journey in minute detail, O’Brien, Cambridge professor of American intellectual history, juxtaposes her encounters with a dazzling array of fashionable nobles with ruined towns and impoverished survivors struggling in the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars. O’Brien (Conjectures of Order: Intellectual Life and the American South, 1810–1860 ) effectively highlights Louisa’s unease as a European-bred, naturalized American descended from a mother’s illegitimate birth, who marries into the intimidating Puritan family of John and Abigail Adams. Using a range of sources, O’Brien reconstructs memories omitted in Louisa’s memoir and delves into a 50-page diversion on her marriage, slowing the travelogue’s pace. Readers of American and European history will exult in the informative contrast of postrevolutionary American values and the glittering European and Russian courts, which steadfastly ignored the horrific effects of continental warfare. 40 b&w illus., 1 map. (Mar.)