Esther (Penguin Classics) - Softcover

Adams, Henry

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9780140447545: Esther (Penguin Classics)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140447547 ISBN 13: 9780140447545

Publisher: Penguin Classics, 1999

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Best known for his classic American memoir, The Education of Henry Adams, Henry Adams was one of the most lively, probing writers between the Civil War and World War I. An offspring of presidents, Adams was steeped in the intellectual and moral traditions of the eighteenth century yet became an enthusiast of the energy, science, and industry of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Esther -- originally published in 1884 under a female pseudonym -- is the story of Esther Dudley, a young painter, who meets a clergyman, Stephen Hazard of St. John's in New York City. At first she recoils from him, owing to his preoccupation with ministry and her radical views imbibed from her moribund father. When Esther receives a commission to renovate the decorations of the church, however, Stephen becomes an admirer of her painting and a friend to her ailing father. Esther finds herself drawn to the clergyman and, after her father's passing, even becomes engaged to him. But can she surrender her moral independence to marry him? A memorable portrait of a woman in an agonizing transition, Esther is also an insightful portrait of a confident age encountering the tensions among science, art, and religion.

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From the Back Cover:

Esther (1884), the second of two novels by noted American historian Henry Adams (1838-1918), deals with a woman's inability to accept religious faith as men have formulated it. Esther Dudley, a young New York socialite and artist raised without religion, falls in love with Episcopal clergyman Stephen Hazard, but she cannot embrace his Christianity and remain true to herself. Displaying the subtle interplay of mind found in the best work of Henry James, Esther suggests the symbolism of the Virgin Mary that Adams would take up some twenty years later in his Mont Saint-Michel and Chartres, a Study in Thirteenth-Century Unity: Esther rejects Hazard just as the Virgin rejected the scholastic formulation of the Trinity and the whole medieval system of moral law.

About the Author:

Born in 1838 into one of the oldest and most distinguished families in Boston, a family which had produced two American presidents, Henry Adams had the opportunity to pursue a wide-ranging variety of intellectual interests during the course of his life. Functioning both in the world of practical men and afffairs (as a journalist and an assistant to his father, who was an American diplomat in Washinton and London), and in the world of ideas (as a prolific writer, the editor of the prestigious North American Review, and a professor of medieval, european, and American history at Harvard), Adams was one of the few men of his era who attempted to understand art, thought, culture, and history as one complex force field of interacting energies. His two masterworks in this dazzling effort are Mont Saint Michel and Chartres and The Education of Henry Adams, published one after the other in 1904 and 1907. Taken together they may be read as Adams' spiritual autobiography—two monumental volumes in which he attempts to bring together into a vast synthesis all of his knowledge of politics, economics, psychology, science, philosophy, art, and literature in order to attempt to understand the individual's place in history and society. They constitute one of the greatest historical and philosophical meditations on the human condition in all of literature.

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