Marian Adams

Marian Adams (born September 13, 1843, Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.—died December 6, 1885, Washington, D.C.) was an American social arbiter who was widely acknowledged for her wit, as an accomplished photographer in the early 1880s, and as the wife of historian Henry Adams.

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Marian Hooper—called Clover by family and friends—was the youngest child of Boston Brahmins. Her mother, Ellen Sturgis Hooper, a published poet and a friend of the author Margaret Fuller, died of tuberculosis when Clover was five years old. Her father, Robert Hooper, was a part-time oculist and independently wealthy; he never remarried and dedicated himself to the care and education of his three children. He and Clover were devoted to one another, keeping up an extensive correspondence.

After her 1872 marriage to Henry Adams, great-grandson and grandson of American presidents, Clover presided over a social salon in Boston’s Back Bay while Henry taught history at Harvard University. In 1877 the couple moved to Washington, D.C., so that Henry could begin work on his monumental histories of early America. Their home on H Street, across from Lafayette Park and the White House, became a centre for the intellectual, artistic, and political elite of the city. Their close circle of friends, known as the “Five of Hearts,” included John Hay, who later served as secretary of state for Presidents William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt, and Clarence King, the first director of the U.S. Geological Survey.

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Known for her quick wit, Clover was athletic, fluent in French, enjoyed reading the ancient classics in the original Greek, and was fascinated by the visual arts, especially painting. She was devoted to animals, and her preferred way to travel was on the back of her horse. The novelist Henry James memorably called her a “perfect Voltaire in petticoats.” Not having children, she and her husband lived, as he said, “very much together.” In the last years of her life, she also became a gifted photographer, taking portraits of her friends, including the historians George Bancroft and Francis Parkman, the architect H.H. Richardson, and the jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. She also took pictures of Washington, D.C., and the rural scenery on Boston’s North Shore; her portraits of children and of her women friends are particularly notable.

After the death of her father in 1885, Clover’s life began to unravel, and she sank into a deep intractable depression. On December 6, 1885, she committed suicide by drinking potassium cyanide, a chemical she used to develop her photographs. In the months that followed, Henry Adams commissioned their friend the American sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens to create a memorial to her. The bronze seated figure that marks her grave in Rock Creek Cemetery in Washington, D.C.—a work of art sometimes called Grief—is widely acknowledged to be one of the sculptor’s masterpieces, and it drew a wide range of responses and visitors, including Mark Twain, Henry James, and Eleanor Roosevelt. Henry Adams, who does not mention his wife in his most famous work, The Education of Henry Adams, never remarried and was buried next to Clover in 1918.

Her letters to her father were published as The Letters of Mrs. Henry Adams, 1865–1883 in 1936. There are few extant images of her and no painted portraits. Many of the photographs she took can be seen at the Massachusetts Historical Society.