Mrs. Adams in Winter A Journey in the Last Days of Napoleon [Paperback]

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, across the battlefields of Germany, and into a France then experiencing the tumultuous events of Napoleon's return from Elba. The prize-winning 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 Winteroffers a moving portrait of a lady, her difficult marriage, and her conflicted sense of what it meant to be a woman caught between worlds.

Michael O'Brienis Professor of American Intellectual History at the University of Cambridge. He is the author ofConjectures of Order: Intellectual Life and the American South, 18101860, which won the Bancroft Prize and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History.

Marvelous...O'Brien demonstrates an enviable mastery of the historian's craft. The Cleveland Plain Dealer

Into this chronological narrative of life on the road, O'Brien skillfully weaves a series of telling anecdotes from Louisa Catherine Adams's experience as a wife, mother, and American expatriate in Europe . . . InMrs. Adams in Winter, Michael O'Brien takes up her challenge, and succeeds commendably in bringing to light her story--a story that might otherwise have remained in the shadow of the family into which she never truly fit. Grace E. Jackson, The Harvard Crimson

This enthralling, vividly written book tells the story of an amazing journey in extraordinary times undertaken by a most uncommon woman . . . [O'Brien] displays admirable psychological insight into Mrs. Adams' usually complex personality and general gestalt . . . Mr. O'Brien has done a superb job of really understanding one of our lesser known first llƒ1