Love and Power in the Nineteenth Century

About

This fascinating biography of a marriage in the Gilded Age closely examines the dynamic flow of power, control, and love between Washington blue blood Violet Blair and New Orleans attorney Albert Janin. Based on their voluminous correspondence as well as Violet’s extensive diaries, it offers a thoroughly intimate portrait of a fifty-four-year union which, in many ways, conformed to societal strictures, yet always created its own definition of itself in order to fit the flux of needs of both husband and wife.

Central to their story is Violet’s fierce determination to maintain her autonomy within the patriarchic institution of marriage. An enduring belle who thought, talked, and acted with the assurance and self-confidence of one whose wishes demanded obedience, she rejected the Victorian ideal of women as silent, submissive consorts. Yet her feminism was a private one, not played out on a public stage but kept to the confines of her own daily life and marriage.

With abundant documentary evidence to draw upon, Laas ties this compelling story to broader themes of courtiship behavior, domesticity, gender roles, extended family bonds, elitism, and societal stereotyping. Deeply researched and beautifully written, Love and Power in the Nineteenth Century has the dual virtue of making an important historical contribution while also appealing to a broad popular audience.

Author

Virginia Jeans Laas is associate professor of history at Missouri Southern State College. She is author of Wartime Washington: The Civil War Letters of Elizabeth Blair Lee and coauthor of Lincoln’s Lee: The Life of Samuel Phillips Lee.

Praise

“As a character in a novel, Violet Blair would be unbelievable, but she was in fact an extraordinary but real person whose many faults and virtues are thoroughly documented in this beautifully written and entertaining biography that also reveals much about the mores and values of America’s social elite in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.”
—Elbert B. Smith, author of Francis Preston Blair

“She was vain, arrogant, and egotistical—a belle and a beauty who was determined to be no man’s slave. Thus Violet Blair rejected twelve suitors before marrying Albert Janin in 1874, only to find him to be an improvident business man incapable of supporting her. By a superb interweaving of letters and diaries, Virginia Laas here captures the drama and the pathos of this fifty-four-year union which endured post-nuptial flirtations, long separations and shifts of power within the marriage. The historical account reads better than a Gilded Age novel and gives fascinating insights not only into the couple’s personal lives, but also into the society of the nation’s capital and Violet’s attempts to stem the diminishing influence of the old Washington elite.”
—Mary Lee Spence editor of The Arizona Diary of Lily Fremont, 1878–1881

Award

Winner, 1999 Missouri Conference on History Book Award