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Mrs. Adams in Winter
- A Journey in the Last Days of Napoleon
- Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell
- Length: 12 hrs and 8 mins
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Publisher's summary
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.
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Editorial reviews
Louisa Catherine Johnson Adams, wife of John Quincy Adams, sixth president of the United States of America, had glossy brown hair, chestnut eyes, and was fluent in French. Her prettiness was ordinary, but her charm and spirit of mischief were rare. Louisa was intelligent and self-deprecating. In Mrs. Adams in Winter: A Journey in the Last Days of Napoleon, historian Michael O’Brien reveals she also struggled with depression, felt underestimated by mother-in-law Abigail Adams, and resented her nomadic life “measured out in packing cases”.
As a narrator, the introspective, observant Cassandra Campbell seems intuitively matched to tell the story of Louisa Adams, a complicated survivor of 14 pregnancies, nine miscarriages, and one stillborn birth. Mrs. Adams in Winter is factually based on Louisa’s 1840 memoir, Adventures of a Nobody, which recounts her 2,000-mile, 40-day journey by horsedrawn carriage, accompanied by 7-year-old son Charles, from the royal courts of St. Petersburg, Russia to Paris, where John held a diplomatic post.
Louisa’s travels began February 12, 1815, on her 40th birthday. Drooping from a grueling social calendar, she noted that Russian winters were relentlessly stifling, the homes of the wealthy heated to suffocation. Louisa was weary of being always bundled in fur.
Campbell paces her reading to Louisa’s conversational rhythms, even slipping fluidly into French and Russian, her accent in both languages so unstilted, it never distracts from Louisa’s anecdotes of filthy inns, meals of “beer soup”, and the gritty landscape of a Europe haunted by the Napoleonic Wars. While you may long for more details on such run-of-the-mill topics as Adams nursing hangovers after a fancy ball, O’Brien’s claim that Louisa is a “woman acting in the name of other women”, renders Campbell’s plaintive, respectful interpretation of the future First Lady that much more compelling. Nita Rao
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This superbly told story brings to life one of the most remarkable rulers––and men––in all of history and conveys the drama of his life and world. The Russia of Peter's birth was very different from the Russia his energy, genius, and ruthlessness shaped. Crowned co-Tsar as a child of ten, after witnessing bloody uprisings in the streets of Moscow, he would grow up propelled by an unquenchable curiosity, everywhere looking, asking, tinkering, and learning, fired by Western ideas.
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Narrater ruins everything
- By BrendaLouQuilts on 12-30-11
By: Robert K. Massie
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Marie Antoinette
- The Journey
- By: Antonia Fraser
- Narrated by: Donada Peters
- Length: 20 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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France's iconic queen, Marie Antoinette, wrongly accused of uttering the infamous "Let them eat cake", was alternately revered and reviled during her lifetime. For centuries since, she has been the object of debate, speculation, and the fascination so often accorded illustrious figures in history. Married in mere girlhood, this essentially lighthearted child was thrust onto the royal stage and commanded by circumstance to play a significant role in European history.
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Annoying Narration
- By LaFemmeRouge on 10-28-06
By: Antonia Fraser
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The Duchess
- By: Amanda Foreman
- Narrated by: Wanda McCaddon
- Length: 15 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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Lady Georgiana Spencer was the great-great-great-great-aunt of Diana, Princess of Wales, and was nearly as famous in her day. In 1774 Georgiana achieved immediate celebrity by marrying William Cavendish, fifth Duke of Devonshire, one of England's richest and most influential aristocrats. She became the queen of fashionable society and founder of the most important political salon of her time.
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Captivating Biography with Outstanding Narration
- By Johanna on 05-15-16
By: Amanda Foreman
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Gertrude Bell
- Queen of the Desert, Shaper of Nations
- By: Georgina Howell
- Narrated by: Corrie James
- Length: 18 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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She has been called the female Lawrence of Arabia, which, while not inaccurate, fails to give Gertrude Bell her due. She was at one time the most powerful woman in the British Empire: a nation builder, the driving force behind the creation of modern-day Iraq. Born in 1868 into a world of privilege, Bell turned her back on Victorian society, choosing to read history at Oxford and going on to become an archaeologist, spy, Arabist, linguist, author, poet, photographer, and legendary mountaineer.
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Shattering The Glass Ceiling in Britain
- By Nostromo on 08-05-18
By: Georgina Howell
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A Magnificent Obsession
- Victoria, Albert, and the Death That Changed the British Monarchy
- By: Helen Rappaport
- Narrated by: Wanda McCaddon
- Length: 11 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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After the untimely death of Prince Albert, the Queen and her nation were plunged into a state of grief so profound that this one event would dramatically alter the shape of the British monarchy. For Britain had not just lost a prince: during his 20-year marriage to Queen Victoria, Prince Albert had increasingly performed the function of King in all but name. The outpouring of grief after Albert's death was so extreme that its like would not be seen again until the death of Princess Diana 136 years later.
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All consuming grief
- By Flatbroke on 06-15-13
By: Helen Rappaport
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John Adams
- By: David McCullough
- Narrated by: Nelson Runger
- Length: 29 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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McCullough's John Adams has the sweep and vitality of a great novel. This is history on a grand scale, an audiobook about politics, war, and social issues, but also about human nature, love, religious faith, virtue, ambition, friendship, and betrayal, and the far-reaching consequences of noble ideas. Above all, it is an enthralling, often surprising story of one of the most important and fascinating Americans who ever lived.
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An outstanding biography
- By Davis on 07-10-06
By: David McCullough
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Those Wild Wyndhams
- Three Sisters at the Heart of Power
- By: Claudia Renton
- Narrated by: Claudia Renton
- Length: 15 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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They were confidantes to British prime ministers, poets, writers, and artists, their lives entwined with the most celebrated and scandalous figures of the day, from Oscar Wilde to Henry James. They were the lovers of great men - or men of great prominence... They lived in a world of luxurious excess, a world of splendor at 44 Belgrave Square and later at the even more vast Clouds, the exquisite Wiltshire house on 4,000 acres, the "house of the age", designed in 1876 by the visionary architect Philip Webb - the model for Henry James' The Spoils of Poynton.
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SLOW START BUT STICK WITH THIS ONE
- By The Louligan on 01-22-19
By: Claudia Renton
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Victoria: The Queen
- An Intimate Biography of the Woman Who Ruled an Empire
- By: Julia Baird
- Narrated by: Lucy Rayner
- Length: 21 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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When Victoria was born, in 1819, the world was a very different place. Revolution would threaten many of Europe’s monarchies in the coming decades. In Britain, a generation of royals had indulged their whims at the public’s expense, and republican sentiment was growing. The Industrial Revolution was transforming the landscape, and the British Empire was commanding ever larger tracts of the globe. In a world where women were often powerless, during a century roiling with change, Victoria went on to rule the most powerful country on earth with a decisive hand.
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Masterpiece!!
- By DKSTRYKER on 01-07-24
By: Julia Baird
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The Mistresses of Cliveden
- Three Centuries of Scandal, Power, and Intrigue in an English Stately Home
- By: Natalie Livingstone
- Narrated by: Elizabeth Knowelden
- Length: 17 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Overlooking the Thames, the Cliveden mansion is flanked by two wings and surrounded by lavish gardens. Throughout its storied history, Cliveden has been a setting for misbehavior, intrigue, and passion - from its salacious, deadly beginnings in the 17th century to the 1960s Profumo affair, the sex scandal that toppled the British government. Now, in this immersive chronicle, the manor's current mistress, Natalie Livingstone, opens the doors to this prominent house and lets the walls do the talking.
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disappointed
- By Galina M. on 11-14-16
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We Two
- Victoria and Albert: Rulers, Partners, Rivals
- By: Gillian Gill
- Narrated by: Rosalyn Landor
- Length: 18 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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It was the most influential marriage of the 19th Century - and one of history’s most enduring love stories. Traditional biographies tell us that Queen Victoria inherited the throne as a naïve teenager, when the British Empire was at the height of its power, and seemed doomed to find failure as a monarch and misery as a woman until she married her German cousin Albert and accepted him as her lord and master. Now renowned chronicler Gillian Gill turns this familiar story on its head, revealing a strong, feisty queen, and a brilliant, fragile prince working together to build a family.
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I found it extremely moving.
- By Cheryl on 08-07-09
By: Gillian Gill
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Romantic Outlaws
- The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Her Daughter Mary Shelley
- By: Charlotte Gordon
- Narrated by: Susan Lyons
- Length: 22 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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Charlotte Gordon's new work is a fresh look at the lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley, who together comprise one of the most illustrious and inspiring mother-daughter pairs in history.
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Tons of info, poor format choice.
- By Gotta Tellya on 02-06-17
By: Charlotte Gordon
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Eliza Hamilton
- The Extraordinary Life and Times of the Wife of Alexander Hamilton
- By: Tilar J. Mazzeo
- Narrated by: January LaVoy
- Length: 10 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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Fans fell in love with Eliza Hamilton - Alexander Hamilton’s devoted wife - in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s phenomenal musical Hamilton. But they don’t know her full story. A strong pioneer woman, a loving sister, a caring mother, and, in her later years, a generous philanthropist, Eliza had many sides - and this fascinating biography brings her multifaceted personality to vivid life.
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Eliza Deserves Better
- By jmn89 on 12-20-19
By: Tilar J. Mazzeo
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Ambition and Desire
- The Dangerous Life of Josephine Bonaparte
- By: Kate Williams
- Narrated by: Corrie James
- Length: 14 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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Josephine de Beauharnais began as a kept woman of Paris and became the most powerful woman in France. She was no beauty; her teeth were rotten, and she was six years older than her husband, but one twitch of her skirt could bring running the man who terrorized Europe. The tale of Napoleon and Josephine is one of the most famous love stories in the world. With Josephine, Napoleon became the greatest man in Europe, the Supreme Emperor.
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Thrilling, romantic, fascinating, and enlightening
- By Leon Miller on 03-30-17
By: Kate Williams
What listeners say about Mrs. Adams in Winter
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Doug
- 01-13-14
Fascinating story of the early nineteenth century
The story is well researched, and there is so much to learn here - how "post roads" worked in Europe, the scattered ruins of castles that still littered the countryside like dinosaur bones of the feudal system, the shifting alliances of the powers of the day.
If I were editor on this project I would make one change - just as the journey reaches it's penultimate point, with Louisa across most of the continent and Napoleon returned and growing stronger - just then the book takes a long detour to describe the background of Louisa's state of mind - everything from the details of her marriage to her miscarriage in St. Petersburg. These are interesting facts, too, but their placement in the book detracts from the story of the journey, and if I were editing I would rearrange the chapters for better continuity.
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Overall
- Michael
- 10-31-10
Interesting Book on Mrs. Adams
I listened to this book after listening to a book on John Q. Adams to get more information on his wife. I found the first part of this audio book hard to listen to. The first part deals too much for me on the people in Russia and Germany, which I'm not very educated on. The second half was much more interesting becasue it dealt with Louisa and JQA. Not so much on her journey from St. Petersburg to Paris,France but it was interesting to hear her story of their marriage and their children.
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3 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Helen
- 07-14-10
Wrong title
I am disappointed with this book. It should have been called The Biography of Mrs. Adams. I thought it was disorganized, it kept bouncing in and out of the past, no hint of chronology. There was so much detail about stuff that had nothing to do with Mrs. Adams' trip. Every once in a while, the author would get back to the trip, I guess just to keep the thread of continuity alive. I have read other biographies, and I kept wondering why I bought this book. I had a feeling of cotton in my mouth it was so dry, and my eyes started to cross. Sorry, just my opinion. Mr. O'Brien did a fantastic reasearch job, but just didn't quite put it together correctly for this title.
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2 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Kae See
- 10-08-10
Anything but Mrs. Adam's trip
If you want an exhaustive and BORING lesson on German and Russian history than this book is for you. There is little of Mrs. Adam's trip in this book that it is a wonder the author chose this title. When the author does get around to talking about the actual trip, with its dangers and pitfalls, it is interesting. But what happens is at each stop she makes the author will then go on to describe, in the most detailed boring manner possible, the history of all the people, places, houses, customs and so on. By the time she gets 'back on the road' you've forgotten you were even listening to a book about a journey from Russia to Paris. You end up hating her, hating JQ Adams, the Adams family, and just about everyone else in the book. Another side point, I hated the way the narrator pronounced all the foreign names in the book. Sounded like bad high school German. Save your credits/money. Instead get a copy of Louisa Adam's memoirs if you want the real story.
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2 people found this helpful