National Network for Equitable Library Service

When Victor Hugo died in 1885, the world was shocked to discover that he had a lone survivor: his daughter Adèle, incarcerated in an asylum for insane gentlewomen. Adèle Hugo was an accomplished, intelligent, and ambitious young woman whose potential shrank with every year she spent under her tyrannical father's roof. At thirty-three, she fell desperately in love with an English soldier who quickly lost interest in everything about her except her money. Her obsession with him proved her undoing. In Adèle Hugo: La Misérable, Leslie Smith Dow recounts Adèle's nine-year pursuit of her unwilling lover from Guernsey to Halifax to Barbados, her return to her father's sphere by a former slave, and the progressive schizophrenia that finally incapacitated her. Smith Dow bases Adèle's stranger-than-fiction history on her bizarre diaries, her family's letters, and the testimony of eyewitnesses.