A woman of not so very long ago speaks to us today, with a new introduction by a leading woman of our day. Marian Hooper—known from childhood as "Clover"—was one of the most remarkable American women of the nineteenth century. She and her husband, the celebrated historian Henry Adams, grandson of John Quincy Adams, resided for the last part of her life in a magnificent Washington house next door to President McKinley's Secretary of State, John Hay (the two structures later became the Hays-Adams Hotel). Here Clover practiced her art of photography—one of the first American women to enter that field—and held a salon for politicians and writers of every stripe: Henry James came to visit often, as did General Sherman, McKinley, Clarence King, Oscar Wilde, and dozens of others. And for a period of seven years Clover wrote to her father in Boston a series of warm, chatty, hilariously perceptive letters about those salons and about Washington life and politics in the Gilded Age—an age that resembles, in many disturbing ways, our own time. These letters, first selected and published by Ward Thoron in 1937, constitute one of the forgotten gems of American history. The distinguished Emmy-award winning journalist and historian Cokie Roberts has written a brilliant new introduction to this fascinating and delightful collection. Herself a member of a great American political family, Roberts has long lived and worked in Washington. She is the most insightful and eloquent commentator on Washington life and politics since . . . Clover Adams. Read the favorable review in the Wall Street Journal here.