Dear Abigail: The Intimate Lives and Revolutionary Ideas of Abigail Adams and Her Two Remarkable Sisters
Advance praise forDear Abigail “In a beautifully wrought narrative, Diane Jacobs has brought the high-spirited, hyperarticulate Smith sisters, and the early years of the American republic, to rich, luminous life. . . . A stunning, sensitive work of history.”—Stacy Schiff, Pulitzer Prize–winning author ofCleopatra “Jacobs is a superb storyteller. In this sweeping narrative about family and friendship during the American Revolution, Abigail Adams emerges as one of the great political heroines of the eighteenth century. I fell in love with her all over again.”—Amanda Foreman,New York Timesbestselling author ofA World on Fire “Beauty, brains, and breeding—Elizabeth, Abigail, and Mary had them all. This absorbing history shows how these close-knit and well-educated daughters of colonial America become women of influence in the newly begotten United States. Jacobs’s feel for the period is confident; so is her appreciation of the nuances of character.”—Daniel Mark Epstein, author ofThe Lincolns: Portrait of a Marriage “To turn the pages of this beautifully written biography is to step into the shoes of the three Smith sisters in a brilliant reconstruction of their lives against the backdrop of American history. Their triumphs and sorrows remain with you long after you’ve finished reading.”—Marion Meade, author ofDorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This? “The three Smith sisters were witnesses to and participants in some of the most important events of early American history, and their spritely letters attest to their indomitable public spirit as well as their familial devotion to each other. In Diane Jacobs’s illuminating account of their remarkable lives, the personal is indeed the political as we gain insight into how our country came to be and how the Smith sisters helped to make us into the Americans we are today.”—Deirdre Bair, author ofSimone de Beauvoir: A Biography“Jacobs weaves a fascinating fabric from the ties that bound, thrilled, and sometimes frustrated America’s most beloved Founding Mother to her sisters. A must-read for those interested in the women’s lives during the Revolutionary period.”—Nancy Rubin Stuart, author ofDefiant Brides: The Untold Story of Two Revolutionary-Era Women and the Radical Men They Married “Jacobs elegantly intertwines the personal with the political. Her intimate accounts of the lives and families of Abigail Adams and her two intellectual, passionately engaged sisters illuminate the history of colonial Massachusetts, eighteenth-century Enlightenment England, Revolutionary Paris, and the nascent United States.”—Sydney Ladensohn Stern, author ofGloria Steinem: Her Passions, Politics, and Mystique “Abigail Adams and her two sisters demonstrate how women, the generals in charge of their families, did so much to make America what it is today. Their three different stories become one magnificent epic in an astonishing feat of narrative history and biography.”—Carl Rollyson, author ofAmerican Isis: The Life and Art of Sylvia Plath