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Title details for Mrs. Adams in Winter by Michael O'Brien - Available

Mrs. Adams in Winter

A Journey in the Last Days of Napoleon

by Michael O'Brien
Cassandra Campbell
Audiobook
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Early in 1815, Louisa Catherine Adams and her young son left St. Petersburg in a heavy Russian carriage and set out on a difficult journey to meet her husband, John Quincy Adams, in Paris. She traveled through the snows of eastern Europe, down the Baltic coast to Prussia, across the battlefields of Germany, and into a France that was then experiencing the tumultuous events of Napoleon's return from Elba. Along the way, she learned what the long years of Napoleon's wars had done to Europe, what her old friends in the royal court in Berlin had experienced during the French occupation, how it felt to have her life threatened by reckless soldiers, and how to manage fear.


The journey was a metaphor for a life spent crossing borders: born in London in 1775, she had grown up partly in France, and in 1797 she had married into the most famous of American political dynasties and become the daughter-in-law of John and Abigail Adams.


The prizewinning historian Michael O'Brien reconstructs for the first time Louisa Adams's extraordinary passage. An evocative history of the experience of travel in the days of carriages and kings, Mrs. Adams in Winter offers a moving portrait of a lady, her difficult marriage, and her conflicted sense of what it meant to be a woman caught between worlds.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Awards

  • Release date

    March 8, 2010

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9781400196319
      • File size: 349665 KB
      • Duration: 12:08:28

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      In 1815, just as Napoleon was returning from Elba to renewed warfare, John Quincy Adams's wife, Louisa, traveled by coach from Russia to Paris to join her husband--an arduous, perilous trip. O'Brien uses her story as a framework for excursions in history, geography, and biography. Cassandra Campbell's reading is clear and well paced, though something in her tone always sounds slightly querulous. Her German accent is overdone, but her French accent is mostly good. She sometimes mispronounces English; most annoyingly, she delivers every variant of "twenty" as "twenny." Literate listeners will bark their shins on her mispronunciations too often to fully enjoy this interesting, if sometimes wandering, history. W.M. (c) AudioFile 2010, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      December 14, 2009
      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.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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