By Mary Carter
Eagle Times Correspondent
CORNISH, NH — Marian “Clover” Adams lived a short yet extraordinary life.
The daughter of transcendentalist poet Ellen Sturgis Hooper, Clover was born in Boston, MA, in the fall of 1843. Because of her mother’s literary connections, social affairs at the Hoopers’ Beacon Hill home included guests such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Clover did her part during the Civil War by raising funds and caring for the sick and wounded. Following the war, she met her future husband, Henry Adams. Adams, a descendent of two former American presidents, was an author, cultural critic and a philosopher.
The couple eventually settled in Washington, DC, where Clover became a hostess noted for her wit and charm. Clover’s adventures were chronicled in her Sunday letters to her father.
At the age of 40, Clover became a self-taught photographer, even learning how to develop camera images herself. Her body of work, which is archived at the Massachusetts Historical Society, shows Clover’s natural skills for this evolving art. lover, in many ways, was a pioneer of portrait photography.
She kept meticulous notes about her photos, many of which depicted a woman’s place in the Gilded Age of America. It was hinted that her husband dismissed her photography as an aimless hobby and denied Clover’s wish to have her work recognized.
Clover suffered from depression that worsened when her beloved father died. Taking her own life in 1885, Clover’s chosen method was potassium cyanide, a chemical used to develop photos. This, perhaps, made more of a statement than any crafted suicide letter ever could. Her death was reported in the papers as being caused by “a paralysis of the heart.”
Destroyed by grief and possible guilt, Adams burned all of his wife’s letters, and never again spoke her name in public. Furthermore, she is not mentioned in Adams’ book, “The Education of Henry James.” It was as if the years of their seemingly perfect union never existed. Only later would Adams confess his heartbreak to close friends in letters. “I have buried nearly everything I lived for,” he wrote to Anne Palmer Fell.
While touring Japan with artist John LaFarge, Adams was inspired by Buddhist philosophy. With LaFarge’s help, Adams commissioned renowned Cornish, NH, artist Augustus Saint-Gaudens to create a memorial for Clover’s grave at Rock Creek Cemetery in Washington, DC. Saint-Gaudens’ initial notes for the sculpture were: “Adams – Buhda [sic]…Calm reflection in contrast with the violence or force in nature.”
Saint-Gaudens called his sculpture, “The Mystery of the Hereafter and The Peace of God that Passeth Understanding.” Henry Adams was insistent that the work, which held no resemblance to his late wife, would also bear no name. Mark Twain would destroy that hope when, through his own observations, Clover’s memorial came to be known as “Grief.”
Despite Adams’ desire for a quiet remembrance, the statue was an instant DC attraction. New Yorker Magazine critic Alexander Woollcott, who could be openly brutal at times, called Clover’s memorial: “the most beautiful thing fashioned by the hand of man on this continent.”
A 1972 recasting of “Grief” can be seen on the grounds of the Saint-Gaudens National Historical Park in Cornish.
“In my whole life,” Adams wrote to a friend, “I met only one woman whom I wanted to marry and I married her.” Henry Adams died in 1918 and is buried in an unmarked spot at the foot of Clover’s timeless memorial.
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