Love and Power in the Nineteenth Century: The Marriage of Violet Blair.

Love and Power in the Nineteenth Century: The Marriage of Violet Blair. By Virginia Jeans Laas. (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1998. Pp. xiv, 169. Paper, $16.00, ISBN 1-55728-505-5; cloth, $32.00, ISBN 1-55728-506-3.)

In the space of a few pages Violet Blair (1848-1933) is described by her contemporaries and by the author as willful, vain, egotistical, confident, conceited, narcissistic, superior, arrogant, craving attention, cynical, imperious, cruel, and cold. Clearly this is no shrinking violet. To know Violet Blair Janin is not to love her or even to like her. While Laas respects Janin's passion for independence, many readers will find even respect hard to muster.

Laas paints a compelling portrait of the unfullfilling and unconventional marriage of Violet Blair and charming but hapless Albert Janin, drawing on the unusually rich deposits of Blair and Janin family papers that stretch from the Huntington Library in California to the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. Laas has mined these veins before with books on Elizabeth Blair Lee and Samuel Phillips Lee, but this is her best and most ambitious work on the extended Blair clan.

Laas also draws on recent scholarship from gender and women's studies and on Washington and elite history to provide a vivid, contextualized picture of Blair's courtship, her marriage, and her Washington. There is no better documented or more sensitive description of an urban belleship to be found. Equally good is Laas's insight into the importance of groups like the Colonial Dames for women like Violet Blair Janin, who understood that if their class was no longer preeminent, their own importance was diminished.

Janin's incredible arrogance regarding her blue Blair blood is both hilarious (she refers to her new neighbor, Henry Adams, the great-grandson and grandson of presidents, as one of the parvenus) and pathetic. Her generation had little to be puffed up about: her brother was a libertine and her sister was highly volatile.

Laas shows the dark side of this pride of class and twisted patriotism. Few men or women articulated their loathing for immigrants as chillingly as Violet Blair Janin. She raves in her journal about "these vermin" and claims "I would rather see the cholera here than the immigrants" (p. 109).

While Laas discusses many aspects of Janin's life and marriage, a few are left unexplained and unexplored. Chief among these is the death of her newborn daughter and the impact of her subsequent, perhaps intentional, childlessness in a world in which maternity was revered and all of her friends and relations were mothers.

Laas emphasizes Violet Janin's early and ardent championing of women's rights, but her later turning away from the movement is barely mentioned except to suggest that it was tied to her xenophobia. In fact, the 1909 American Biographical Directories: District of Columbia lists among Violet Blair Janin's many memberships the National Society Opposed to Women's Suffrage.

Money--Albert's inability to make it and Violet's independent means--is a theme throughout the book. Some points of reference, would, however, be helpful. Just how much money did Violet have? How much did tea for 250 cost? Does Violet's mother's loan of $3,000 to Albert represent a sacrifice or a trifle?

The book's only serious shortcoming is lack of an index. If one wants to check on a long-dead Blair or former suitor, frustration soon squelches curiosity.

Albert's late-in-life reversal of fortune, thanks to intra-Blair family squabbling over Manunoth Cave, is fascinating. Indeed, the detailed Blair and Janin family records about the running of the cave, a case study in the developing tourism industry, might just be a rich new vein for Laas to mine in yet another excellent book on the Blairs.

KATHRYN ALLAMONG JACOB

Schlesinger Library