“To Detail the Incidents of Such a Life”: The Life and Writings of Louisa Catherine Adams

At the beginning of her memoir, “Record of a Life,” Louisa Catherine Adams insisted that she had “no pretensions to be a writer” (p. 2). Yet the voluminous content of the recently published two-volume edition, Diary and Autobiographical Writings of Louisa Catherine Adams, clearly contradicts her assertion. As the various writings collected in these volumes suggest, Adams possessed a long-standing, if complicated, desire to write herself into being.

The two-volume set of diary and memoirs are published as part of the expansive Adams Papers series from manuscripts housed at the Massachusetts Historical Society. The volumes reflect the new editorial policy for the Adams Papers, in which “the texts are rendered as literally as possible” (p. xxxviii). Spelling, grammar, capitalization, and punctuation are transcribed exactly as they appear in the manuscripts to provide the reader an accurate sense of the original documents. (Accordingly, all quotations in this essay reflect original spellings, etc.) The editors provide a detailed account of the editorial process, as well as offering useful identifying information in footnotes throughout the text.

As the editors note, Louisa’s various writings indicate “her compulsion to bring order to her life with the written word” (p. xxxvi). Given the variety of writings Louisa produced at different times in her life, the editors had to decide how best to bring about this order. Their decision was “to present Louisa’s life as it unfolded, rather than in the order in which she wrote the material” (p. xxxvii). Thus, the first document presented in volume one is Louisa’s “Record of a Life,” which was written in 1825. “Record” details the events of her idyllic childhood as the daughter of Catherine Nuth and Joshua Johnson, a Maryland merchant who resided in London, and culminates with her rocky courtship with and marriage to John Quincy Adams. The next document is a second memoir with the self-deprecating title “Adventures of a Nobody.” Written in 1840, “Adventures” begins where “Record” left off and takes the reader through the years 1797–1812. During this time, Louisa and John Quincy were world travelers: immediately following their wedding in 1797, they moved from London to Berlin for a diplomatic post, then to the United States, where the couple maintained residences in Massachusetts and Washington, D.C., until 1809, when John Quincy was appointed U.S. minister in Russia.

The third document in the collection was actually the first to be written, a journal Louisa kept while she was living in Russia, dating from 1812 to 1814. That brief document is followed by her lively “Narrative of a Journey from Russia to France.” Written in 1836, this travel narrative details her trip from St. Petersburg to Paris in the winter of 1815 to reunite with her husband, who a year earlier had left Louisa in St. Petersburg while he negotiated the Treaty of Ghent. (Readers interested in learning more about this fascinating journey should consult Michael O’Brien, Mrs. Adams in Winter: A Journey in the Last Days of Napoleon, 2011).

The second volume consists of what the editors treat as a single document, the “Diary of Louisa Catherine Adams, 1819–1849.” This “diary” begins with a series of “journal letters” written from 1819 to 1824, during John Quincy’s term as Secretary of State. The journal letters are followed by Louisa’s sporadic and fragmented diary writings, begun in 1835. (Louisa may have...