Clover Adams: A Gilded and Heartbreaking Life by Natalie Dykstra

The hidden story of one of the most fascinating women of the Gilded Age

Clover Adams, a fiercely intelligent Boston Brahmin, married at twenty-eight the soon-to-be-eminent American historian Henry Adams. She thrived in her role as an intimate of power brokers in Gilded Age Washington, where she was admired for her wit and taste by such luminaries as Henry James, H. H. Richardson, and General William Tecumseh Sherman. Clover so clearly possessed, as one friend wrote, “all she wanted, all this world could give.”

Yet at the center of her story is a haunting mystery. Why did Clover, having begun in the spring of 1883 to capture her world vividly through photography, end her life less than three years later by drinking a chemical developer she used in the darkroom? The key to the mystery lies, as Natalie Dykstra’s searching account makes clear, in Clover’s photographs themselves.

The aftermath of Clover’s death is equally compelling. Dykstra probes Clover’s enduring reputation as a woman betrayed. And, most movingly, she untangles the complex, poignant — and universal — truths of her shining and impossible marriage.

Clover Adams: A Gilded and Heartbreaking Life is available through online retailers such as alibris.com or your local Cape Cod library.

Natalie Dykstra is the author of Clover Adams: A Gilded and Heartbreaking Life, which won a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Fellowship and was a finalist for the 2013 Massachusetts Book Award.  Her recent book, Chasing Beauty: The Life of Isabella Stewart Gardner, has received a New England Society of New York Book Award and the Marfield Prize, the national award for arts writing.  Her work has been supported by a Public Scholars grant from the NEH and an inaugural Robert and Ina Caro Research Fellowship from the Biographers International Organization.  She has been an honorary fellow of the Massachusetts Historical Society since 2011 and is an emerita professor of English at Hope College.  She lives with her husband near Boston.

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