On April 14, 1865, an engaged couple, Henry Rathbone and Clara Harris, accepted the Lincolns' last-minute invitation to join them in their box at Ford's Theatre. For the nation, the impact of that night's tragedy would be felt at once; for Henry and Clara, the denouement of their own private tragedy occurred years later."Henry and Clara" follows the titular couple from their childhood in Albany, New York, where Henry's widowed, ambitious mother sets her cap at Clara's widowed father, Ira Harris, whom Pauline Rathbone sees as a promising politician. A marriage soon follows, and young Henry and Clara find themselves stepbrother and stepsister. Though neither child cares much for the other's parent, Henry and Clara soon gravitate toward each other, and as they mature their feelings grow into romantic love. Before they can marry, though, they must overcome the opposition of their parents, and the outbreak of the Civil War throws yet another obstacle into their path.There is another difficulty, one the determined and devoted Clara doesn't much want to acknowledge: Henry. For Clara, the mercurial Henry is Byronic, but the horrors of war soon disclose how fragile Henry's psyche truly is. Nonetheless, Clara, deeply in love and not willing to give up easily, presses on with her marriage plans, even after the Lincoln assassination strips yet another layer of sanity from Henry.Though the story "Henry and Clara" tells is a tragic one, Mallon's wry narrative voice and his sharp eye prevent it from being a gloomy one. His characterizations are superb, with Clara, the main viewpoint character, being a particular success. Even as Clara becomes more isolated and her situation more grim, she never turns into the pathetic victim she might have become with a less skilled author.If there's a rough patch in the novel, it's at the beginning, where the immersion into Albany politics may be too much for some readers. Persevere, though, and you'll be well rewarded. This was one of the best historical novels I've read.
Henry and Clara are the couple who were sharing the Lincoln's box at Ford's Theater on the night Lincoln was assassinated. They were engaged but had actually been raised together when their parents married each other when Henry was 11 and Clara 13. Henry was severely effected by his experiences in the Civil War and then the rumors and accusations that he could of done more to stop Boothe from killing the president. He became mentally and emotionally unbalanced with a negative impact on his whole family.This book is historical fiction but for the most part I found the history more compelling than the fiction. Especially in the first half of the book where the relationship between Clara and Henry reads very much like a stereotypical Victorian romance novel, wordy and predictable. The story improves in the second half as Henry loses his grip on reality. The prose is at times plodding with many words used when fewer could have made the same point and moved the plot along at a more readable pace.
Do You like book Henry And Clara (1995)?
Quotable:The normal disappointments between man and wife were a sad part of our earthly existence, to be borne with charity and understanding... What if the woman had been the one to make the plan and serve the poison? Would she not then deserve to hang, just as the man, were he the chief evildoer, surely would?... Well, if men and women were to have equality in all things, should not hanging be one of them?Trying to get him to talk about what happened leads only to his ugly censure of everyone's behavior, mine included. I have told him I will not listen to that.from author's acknowledgments:The available documentation of Henry and Clara Rathbone's story -substantial in places, almost entirely lacking in others - amounts in the end to no more than a scaffold, and the reader should know that I have taken liberal advantage of the elbow room between that scaffold's girders and joists.
—Kathy
I did not cre for this book. At times it was a little difficult to get through and at others it was almost impossible. When I finished this afternoon, I was relieved to be done with it. The chapters that contain letters back and forth are all to common and nothing about them separate's them from other books with the same type of letters in them. A lesson learned: Poor Clara waited for her love, her step-brother who came home from the war, mentally damaged. The revelation that Henry made to Clara that he aided Booth's attack on Lincoln only furthered my dislike for the book. At the end of the story, saying that she was merely his sister, Henry "locked" away in an asylum merely goes about day-to-day as though nothing happened, that he did not kill his wife, his step-sister, the mother of his three children.
—James Cooper
Disappointing.I've been holding onto this book for a few years, waiting patiently to be able to read it the week of the anniversary of the Lincoln assassination. So I had unrealistic expectations. But... This story should have read like a soap opera. Their lives were simultaneously thrilling and tragic. Henry and Clara were step-siblings, raised in the same house, who fell in love, and eventually married against the better judgment of her father.Henry served in the Union Army, seeing action at some of the more horrific battles of the Civil War, including Antietam and the Crater. Clara was in Mary Todd Lincoln's inner circle. The young engaged couple accompanied the President and Mrs. Lincoln to the theater in April 1865. Henry tried to fend off John Wilkes Booth, suffering a permanent injury to his arm in the process. Haunted by the memory and his inability to save the President, Henry Rathbone lived the rest of his life dancing around the fringes of insanity before succumbing to it. Yet the author managed to take these characters, this story, and turn it into something pedestrian. At times, I was so bored that I read on only because I knew the story would get better.
—Carolyn
