ship from confederate privateers. jane hampton cook looks at the lead up and aftermath of the war of 1812 in the burning of the white house. and in born right, see nicole mason, executive director of the senator for research and policy and public interest recalls how she overcame poverty during her childhood to become a successful writer and scholar. look for these titles in bookstores this coming week and watch for the authors in the near future on book tv. >>. [inaudible conversation] >> host: welcome to book cart. we are so excited to welcome tonight luisa thomas in

conversation with louisa hall about her new book louisa. that's great. a searching american biography of louisa atoms. louisa hall is the author of two novels. she examines the clash between conscious objectors and soldiers during world war i. it was called daring by the new york times.jessica dray ellis said of "louisa: the extraordinary life of mrs. adams", for a long time i have been waiting for a biographer with sufficient style and emotional range to tell the quite extraordinary story of louisa kaplan adams in all its splendor and sadness. "louisa: the extraordinary life of mrs. adams" has been worth the wait. please join me in welcoming her. [applause]

>> guest: hi everyone, thanks for coming. i am so happy to be here to talkabout this book . also just happy to be part of this group of louisa. i feel like many other louisa's might have been chosen but i'm honored to be the one. this book also is one of my favorite books that i've read this year, i love this book very deeply, not just because of the narcissistic pleasures of reading about somebody with my own name but also because i found that as a biography it was more deeply invested in understanding the interiority of its main characters than any other biography i've read. i feel like this character of louisa atoms came alive for me and remained with me more than any other character in any books that i've read this year. i think louisa made so many fascinating decisions in this

book for me the most interesting was the decision to explore through every shifting weather of this character's mind as much as she was exploring the fascinating facts of her life so i'm looking forward to talking about that decision and all the other ones that were made but just as a little introduction to the story of louisa atoms, it follows her through some kind of giddy, romantic meeting with john quincy adams if it can be described as such with the character as stiff as john quincy adams was. he followed her to berlin and russia and back to washington where she was the wife of a president area one of the things i wanted to ask you off the bat since the theme of the night is louisa is whether the fact that the character's name is louisa drew to the book andwhat was interesting to you about that lexmark . >> guest: is true that i

noticed her a little bit quicker than i might have if her name was jane. but beyond that it was that i think when you are writing about historical figures you cannot, you can't imagine that your by their elbow but you do need sort of a crack through the window into the room . for me probably sharing a name which i don't know of any other louisa, i'm only friends with her because her name is louisa. probably it was a little bit of a deal opener. >>. >> host: my name had to do with how i became a person. i was interested in the fact my name was louisa growing up. did her name affect her personality mark. >> guest: it was a common

name, more than it is now. it's funny, in berlin everybody was named louisa. the queen was louisa. all the duchesses and whatever, royalty, everybody was louisa so i think it was not quite the uncommon. i was making a joke that louisa, i feel more comfortable answering the question that, what is this character's name because we went to college together to give you a little background. people used to think i was just harder. before i met her i had a sense of the kind of shifting ideas. >> host: people still think i'm her if i say my name is louisa and i'm a writer. every time, thank you. i worked hard on that. >> guest: i do think this

louisa, she kind of had to make her own identity in a lot of ways so we are probably more with all of our names. >> host: the thing that fascinated me about this book is that it read more than any other biography like a novel. i felt like i was in a world that was somehow fictional and i was trying to put my finger on what it was that cause that feeling . being swept up into a fictional story even while you were telling the facts of a real person and one other thing that i was thinking was that she moves with such distinctly novelistic settings in her life so she starts her life in the drawing rooms of england jockeying for a husband and then she's in snowy st. petersburg on the eve of the napoleonic invasion and she comes back to america in the early days of the republic and lived in england and i wondered what kind of

oddities you used in order to make that biography feel like a novel and whether that was a conscious decision and why? >> guest: i usually try to do storytelling straight through with being true to getting across one of the ideas that framed historical context and i definitely kept in mind not to speculate sometimes about how she's feeling area she told me she's really unusual in that she talked so much about her feelings area for a figure of that time, a lot of the people we tend to have biographies about work writing about their popularity so they were not talking about feelings in the same way. we all have feelings but maybe not to go through but anyway, i do think that she was not always the best

interpreter of her feelings that they were there on the page and you could put them in context so she gave me so much of material to work with area but at the same time i wanted this to be a great story because her life was a great story and i always just wanted this to unfold as it happened and so much of, i wanted the ideas to be, i didn't want to be written from 10,000 feet and unadjusted, now we're going to talk about this thing or talk about you know, how women were regarded in salons or whatever. i wanted it all to be kind of this book in which the whole thing grows within that, rooted in that really strongly but what we get is actually the kind of the flowering of that. i also did actually read, i

have some novels that i was writing, i found inside of it. she was born in the same year as jane austen and she was born in london. she was raised as a girl like jane austen. no matter. i do think, actually i went back and reread all the chapters. i was not configuring this is novel that i learned something important. what i learned was not to read as many romantic novels as i had in high school but i realized pay attention to the financial language inthe novel , the way they talk aboutmarriages . i contextualize those as tentative and that help me understand something which is that her father goes bankrupt right after she's married and she's devastated by it and she's devastated to agree degree she's actually crazy

and it's about her father does this outrage and she has to confess this year after year, it's not even like she's able to get over it. it's a wound that constantly reopens. but i always thought this was kind of a crazy, that's what was to me. that was like the way they described it. then you go back and read these novels and you realize everybody has a price tag and that actually if you didn't couldn't keep your diary that was grounds for getting out of your memories. go back and you read with that in mind, she says i'm doing my duties, being rigorous and flexible with duty and you realize this is prostitution in her mind, she was trying to stay in that marriage.

and this was deeply, destabilizing and i don't think i would have appreciated that in the same way that i not been able to put that into the soil but at first we go to russia and she is in st. petersburg during the year of war and peace and she is dancing with saar alexander, there's a kind of language again. it was not even written at the same time, you can't take too much from it what you can get the feeling of how it's a sense of place. a book that was important, there was a travel journal, i don't remember quite how but it was written at the same time and this by a beautiful writer.

i want everyone to read it. it's a new york review book, i'll figure it out and you email me . that also helped derive a sense of place. the middlemarch also, the middlemarch again written at the same time. it began, these were not research. these were just to get the feel for how it is to tell a story because what i was after was just because she was interested in facts and dates and what happened and that's also how when someone does something and you get from one place to another but she was interested in was this emotional landscape so i had to kind of contemporary mediums, the actual journey of her life. she collaborated with record of a life in her journey. and then the other one is

size emotional journey that she goes through. she grows so much and that was one of the most exciting things about her was how much she changed it again, i didn't want to write about the figure sort of brush by brush and how they became who they are. she was just kind of dynamics, changing blowing figure. she was not a stable element in that way and i wanted to have that in my book the one that was something that comes through clearly in the book, how mysterious the character she is and how changeable she is, how flexible she is i also notice how invested she is in learning her own voice. wrote three different memoirs, she wrote rows of letters and each of your memoirs is written in a different voice and each letter written in a different voice.sometimes he is complaining and hypochondriac and other times she's

incredibly sensitive and intellectual and other times these laughing at everybody. so it does feel like there's a record of her voice but there's also a record of her many voices and i did wonder reading that whether or not that was accommodated thing as a writer to track this person who seems to have so many different voices and then finding her voice and whether you thought you sort of got to know her by the end of the process or whether she eluded you to theend. >> . >> guest: i definitely felt like i got to know her. my friends say i'm a complicated human being. her voices are what originally drew me to her. i read some of her letters about how they were and how funny something was when i think of how these people were being and how sharp and insightful.she would have given up on thomas jefferson.

so i do think that the voices actually the development of her voice is funny, it's interesting because i read her earlier letters a little bit later and her letter, her second letter took forever and it's on incredibly long run-on sentence about how much she hates writing. her second sentence is i will never quit this subject. for years you write about how much she hated to write. but it's this partially about her becoming a writer. not a published writer although she did publish some of her poems. she became a little bit proud of her poems. i think that that is like that she had these different voices is important because she's a compensated person.

shewants , she actually wrote about washington life and she called herself lady sharply. and she described lady sharply as being the honest compound of work and cold dislikes, of humor andserious stuff and she's right , she's driven by these tensions and paradoxes but at the same time they add up to someone who is really deep in what she meant. those made it easier to understand where all these voices were coming from and also obviously it could be pin from the sound. >> i love that about her. i felt like i had more confidence about her by the end of the novel than in the beginning area terrible.

but i had the best of the novel. i guess my last question and then we can maybe open it up to the audience but i have to give one of these complicated insights into her personality which was that she really rose to the role of leader in the early republic. and a pretty magnificent way and in some ways you could make the argument that she was responsible in many ways for the success of her husband's political career. she was incredibly sharp and intelligent and could sort of terror jefferson down in one of her letters easily but at the same time she is quite retiring and seems to fully accept a woman's place as subservient to her husband or sort of less than her husband. one of her free memoirs was the adventures of a nobody so she fully embraces her nothingness and her smallness and her, like, her humility.

i was interested in, i think now we tend to want to find these female heroines who rise above that and somehow magically managed to be bold ready and have no doubt despite the fact they are educated in every way to doubt themselves and to be humble women and i just wondered how you felt about her alternation between humility and extreme courage and whether that was part of what drew you to her as a character? >> guest: this is one of the ways in which we really do have to understand the context, she is not like her cousin. people live long and she

first started talking to me, they wanted her to be margaret fuller, they wanted her to be a modern woman and wanted to talk about how strong she was and she was. this is a woman who made a 2000 mile journey from st. petersburg to paris with her seven-year-old son through which her pathway, she she had escapees converging on her. she was mistaken for napoleon's sister. she survived a lot. but at the same time she was insecure. she was fragile. she was sick all the time. she was self pitying. she was this complicated person. in many ways i think her insecurities are a little bit liberating. her husband, he was very self serious and he knew he was sort of born for the nation and he had this important role to play and he didn't play it and he was a failure and he had to do these great things and she would have to feel that way. she could sort of lift, cause

she didn't have to be this kind of american icon, she could just be herself and she would take things too seriously including herself. she laughed at everybody else and she laughed at herself and there was a way in which her insecurity was very much a part of who she was and something would be lost if she had more kind of an aloof attitude towards life. so yes, i think the paradox between her accepting the constrictions in her life but at the same time working against them isimportant . she wrote an account of that journey, narrative of the journey and she made it at once painful read in some ways because it's a great story, she's great writer. but he wrote it, she said because she wanted to be remembered but for who she was which suggests she was

worried about being forgotten but at the same time she kind of made it universal, she said she was beginning to show what women could do and that this stayed with me but she said we are the averages of ourselves. are there any questions? >> revolutionary america is sortof on the table , do you think that sort of historical context has something where it's traditionally not positive? >> i think one of the great best transitions to reading when you're looking at people is a pretty good world. i do think that she was not a part of the underclass in any

way and i also one of the threats in this book is about her own instances with slavery to a degree. it's complicated. she lived in the washington dc and was not liberated. you know, i do think that that's not why i approached this book although i just got a job with people, i'm usually drawn to context or whatever reason. the blame, i don't know. but yeah, this is to answer your question adifferent way , the period in which the president was first realand kind of popular . and part of the way in which they negotiated that was

interesting. trying to figure out how this country was changing and how, what kind of relationship they have with people and the pressures of standing and in contentious times and i think we tend to think the early republic is kind of, they knew what they were doing and they were crafting this perfect document and had one problem which is slavery but everything else was figured out. everybody disagreed about everything. they were arguing all the time. everybody was making compromises they didn't necessarily believe in and one of the exciting things about getting her is that you get that because she wasn't trying to reflect the world as she wanted to see it. she was hopeful and despairing and you know, ...

>>. [inaudible question] she evidently dislike jefferson was he writing about her? >> guest: he wasn't writing about her. there were people writing about her, dolly madison something cuttingabout her reading this , being the leading, leading the dislocation of the day so she started the whole thing. and some people wrote, actually hermes wrote a wonderful tribute to how vivacious and funny and how appealing she was. people wrote about her, the hostess. they wrote about her parties actually. there is a lot of that. in letters certainly abigail

wrote about her. people were drawn to her area and they tended to reflect that. anyone else? >> in the context of an old another being, how do you see the role of the first lady being different in the early republic versus how we can see them today? >> it was quite different. one of the things i believe in her life is that her spirit in a way, her house is a little quiet in her life but in terms of being the low point but she didn't have anything to do. wasn't any precedent for a kind of active role for a first lady. she stayed with her, literally, that's what she did. and she copied low scores.

but as a campaigner she actually i think prefigured the role that a lot of first ladies do now. she was being a kind of surrogate figure for someone who was kind of speaking up for some of the flaws. that actually, you can't draw straight line from her to first ladies now because for a long time and partly because louisa was so poor and criticized for being so for, that role disappeared. in fact, she was punished for it in some ways. she got to the white house because he wrote about this, she said they are criticizing me for being too visible. so i need to step back. there was a complicated thing called the emissary in the jackson administration which

had consequences for women in washington. i looked this up but there have been a sort of growing movement, people are interested in the administration and that shut down in the 1820s. especially that there was a kind of women were elevated in the domestics they are, the public sphere and they were angels of the heart and all these things, that was started around the time that johnson was president and the role that women could play even as politicals in washington diminished so it's not like she sets an example for other first ladies but she configured them in a lot of ways. >>. [inaudible question] do you get a sense that she was

trying to remake that society? that she had known women in the white house had a new world to create? >> she was influenced by all that stuff. but she was very sensitive to , you know, you couldn't be too aristocratic and in the united states she was, john adams was with her but how i talk about that is i pretend i'm not a travel lady. so there was a kind of suspicion of her already because of her georgics and she had to sort of, she was at once kind of didn't care and use it for her party and on the other hand she was a liver, she knew she'd be punished for it. one of the interesting things that you put the campaign right is the bishop. that she was drawn in and her propriety or, she was accused

of the sex scandal essentially. and drawn in at the same time to that camp. rector's wife was not goingto divorce her husband . true but it was very suspicious. we think of politics like then was very civil and it was actually, adams was calling jackson a murderer, he was but it was very, it was not bright eyes. >> was there a particular series of her life or episode in her life or aspect of her life that you were frustrated by the historic record about,

that would have been more interesting to go into more detail about what the historical record didn't provide any? >> guest: a great question. certainly that is one of the things i became most interested in and it was, it had business records and legal documents that suggest one thing and she just didn't like about that stuff. so they keep staying together, i can't talk about her attitude toward a single game in place area she got touchups lately. but that's a reason of her silence. >>